Visit The Wineries in Niagara Region

Organizing and managing a wine tasting tour can be a little complex on your own therefore it is advisable to go in for some packages offered by some travel companies.

They will arrange a day wise trip for you wherein you will get to taste maximum number of wines. The trip will also comprise of visiting Niagara on the lake top attractions.

As in most of the wineries the tasting areas are only open for the tourist for some couple of hours, it is advisable to schedule the tasting tour accordingly. Your travel agency will arrange the appointments with the winery producers regarding the visit.

The producers will assure that you are attended properly and get to see all areas of the winery from the vineyards to the wine lab and making rooms so that you get acquainted with the entire course behind making of the Canadian icewine.

They travel companies also arrange for local professional guides and chauffeurs who will guide you through the routes of Niagara on the lake.

Plan a magical wine tour of Niagara on the lake and visit Peller Estates winery, the wine making pioneers. Taste some of their award winning wines and their specialty Trius, Trius is a blend of selected best Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes.
Peller is known for offering the best of best icewines in the area.

Peller Estates Niagara Winery

Niagara on the Lake is truly a tourist’s haven and offers a paradisaical environment to pamper one’s senses. The awesome Niagara Falls Ontario Restaurants are really a visual and appetite treat for the beholder. The place is an amalgamation of Niagara Restaurants, beautiful Niagara Falls Wineries, marvelous natural sights, delectable treats, and what not’s. The climatic conditions offered by the Niagara on the Lake are an asset to the tourism and Niagara Escarpment Wineries. If you have already basked in the majestic glory of the place, then you would know the splendor of Niagara on the Lake.

The whole magic of Niagara Falls Ontario Wine Tours can turn sour if you don’t visit a Niagara on the Lake Winery. You will find umpteen Niagara Escarpment Wineries offering the best ice wine in the world. You will never get to know what you have been missing on until and unless you don’t set your foot in a Niagara Falls Winery. You will have your plate full with fun and merriments while your stay in Niagara on the Lake. The festive mood in the place during the ice-wine festival will drown you in the pool of seamless joy and fun.

Book a Niagara Falls Ontario Wine Tour to drench yourself in some exotic fun. With a marvelous climate and landscapes the Niagara winery tours offers you the memories that you will cherish for a lifetime. One of the leading wineries of the region is Peller; it brings in for you the largest variety of pure ice-wine from the vineyards of Niagara. For more information on ice-wine, browse through www.peller.com.

Making scents of it all - The Niagara wine industry

Nestled in between the Niagara Escarpment and Lake Ontario is one of Canada's biggest and most well-known industries: Wine.

A myriad of wineries to choose from are spread around the region, offering almost anything a true wine aficionado could need. But, for us normal folk, this precious part of the area tends to fall by the wayside, that is, at least during the 50 weeks of the year that there is no specific event dedicated to drawing our attention to it; thats is, The Niagara Wine Festival. Wine can be an intimidating thing.

Those who have ever attempted to go to a winery for a tasting know exactly what I am talking about. Walking into the boutique, having to pretend like you know what you're doing. Following all the formalities of testing that tiny little glass of wine, and at the same time, watching the person beside you to make sure that you didn't miss an important step that would 'ruin' the tasting experience. All the while, being confused because you don't actually see any difference in the colour, smell the rich scent of dark chocolate, or know what the heck a full-bodied wine really entails.

News Source : Making scents of it all- The Niagara wine industry

Niagara Wine Festival returns to its roots

The Niagara Wine Festival is strengthening its community roots. After spending a few years pursuing a more cosmopolitan crowd from outside Niagara, festival organizers have turned their attention to making the marquee event a real homecoming in St. Catharines.

Expect more local musical acts on stage at Montebello Park in September, and look for more of your neighbours walking in the popular annual grande parade.

Kimberly Hundertmark, the festival's interim director of events, said organizers are taking stock of what the festival means to Niagara and listening to calls from the community to bring it back to its roots.

Two years ago, many St.Cat h a r i n e s residents balked at beefed-up entry rules for the grande parade designed to make it more polished and ended up cutting out some local groups.

"When you look at it, it is a homecoming," said Hundertmark, the city's tourism and attractions manager who was brought in last month to organize this year's festival.

"There's a lot of people from out of town coming to it. But essentially the people that are in the cars (on parade day), and that are lining the parade route are people that have grown up here, people that live here. It just made sense to make it more local."

News Source : Niagara Wine Festival returns to its roots

Rose is the top wine for summer

Rose is the quintessential summer wine, and a sparkling rose, like the good value non-vintage Segura Viudas Brut Rose, is double the pleasure.

For my palate, Segura Viudas is the finest Spanish sparkling wine. I enjoy its top brut, Heradad, both for its elegant flavors and texture, and stylish silver-based bottle. But until a recent tasting of the brut rose, a year or more passed since my last taste of any Segura Viudas sparkling wines because, like many consumers, I order French and California sparkling wines instinctively. A twofold mistake.

In November 2003, I visited Segura Viudas, located in Spain's Penedes region. Its 11th-century farmhouse has been expanded into a modern winery with wine cellars descending five stories into the Mediterranean soil. Jose Ferrer and his family own Segura Viudas and the California sparkling wine company, Gloria Ferrer.

Segura Viudas is made according to the Champagne method: After the primary fermentation of changing the grape juice into alcohol, the wine is transferred to bottles, fresh yeast is added and the wine undergoes a secondary fermentation, which creates the bubbles and additional aromas and flavors. Lastly, the spent yeast cells are disgorged from each bottle, a small amount of fresh wine mixed with sugar (called dosage) is added to fill the bottle, and the cork inserted.

The non-vintage Segura Viudas Brut Rose is a blend of 80 percent Trepat and 10 percent each Monastrell and Garnacha, which are traditional Spanish grapes grown in the Penedes region. Two years of aging the wine on the yeast yields an eye-appealing strawberry shade with summer fruit scents of ripe cherries and strawberries.

A mouthful of cherry and raspberry flavor comes bundled with elegant bubbles and fresh, crisp acidity in the finish. Reflecting its Spanish Mediterranean origin, the brut rose is perfectly refreshing on a warm sunny day.

The wine's versatility makes it perfect as an aperitif, delightful with shrimp cocktail, grilled shrimp with yellow rice, mildly spicy ceviche, and fresh fruit salads with summer peaches, nectarines and plums. Its incredibly affordable price allows adding bottles to the ice bucket without freezing your budget. The non-vintage Segura Viudas Brut Rose is distributed by R&R Marketing in Fairfield. It retails for approximately $9.

News Source : Rose is the top wine for summer

Five Reasons To Drink Pink Wine

Reputations can be tough to shed. Perhaps none are more stubborn than rosé's. Why? The wine industry--by cranking out millions of bottles and casks of bland, too-sweet white zinfandel in the 1980s--did its best to kill the notion that pink wine can be a tasty, refreshing, refined drink.

Today, though, rosé is no longer the pink-headed stepchild of the wine shop. According to data from the Wine Market Council, of those Americans who drink at least one glass of wine each week, 18% of the time they drink pink.

Chalk it up to a competitive global wine market, improved grape-growing and winemaking practices and a few important flag wavers such as highly regarded New Zealand winemaker Kim Crawford (in his case, with a rosé called Pansy!, mostly marketed to the gay community). Maybe it's a combination of all three that's made rosé one of the best value-for-dollar wine categories on the shelf.

News Source : Five Reasons To Drink Pink Wine

ViVAS tips on food and wine matching

Most people already know that white wine goes well with white meat and red wine with red meat, but sometimes it can be a lot more complex. There are three basic principles in matching food and wine - matching weight, matching acidity and matching intensity,” says ViVAS marketing manager Henry John, “and if you stick to these, your matches should be a success.”

Weight - When matching by weight you need to pair big strong wines to big strong food and similarly light, simpler wine with lighter foods.

Acidity - Acidity is an important part of any wine. It’s the thing that makes your mouth water, makes the wine refreshing and stimulates you to take another sip. Foods with a lot of acidity, for example tomatoes or vinaigrette dressing, are better with a crisp refreshing wine. Wines which are crisp and mouth-watering will also be good with oily food. A great example of this is an Italian red wine with Italian food where the chief ingredients are olive oil and tomatoes.

News Source: ViVAS tips on food and wine matching

Interesting Facts about Wine Tasting Tour

Wine country tour is planned to enlarge the taste of the tasters, and it could really be enjoyable, since many wine generating regions of the world are very gorgeous.

Characteristically, any wine tasting tour moves around wineries, letting the tasters to view the winery, and possibly meet the wine producer also. In other cases, the trip visits chosen tasting rooms that might pour wines from a unique winery, or several wineries like Niagara on the Lake Wineries. Organizing and managing a wine tasting tour could actually get complex, as the director desires the people on the tour to taste as many wines as probable, while harmonizing the wish to remain in some spots higher than others. The journey may take the shape of a day trip or a more comprehensive quest, and habitually comprise lunch, dinner, and other lodgings as well.

In many cases, a winery or tasting area is open for people during pre set hours. In few cases, a scheduled time needs to be fixed. Scheduled time only wineries are apt to be small, and apprehensive about overwhelming their services with the tasters. By asking visitors to make appointments, the wine producer makes sure that people get a bespoken and frequently cherished experience in the winery tour. In some other cases, the vineyard might in addition offer tours of the wine lab and making rooms that could actually be interesting for people who desire to be acquainted with more about the course behind making wine.

The Benefits of Wine

One of the oldest alcoholic beverages is wine; its existence has been since thousands of years since 6000 B.C. It is made from the fermentation of grape juice. There is whole lot of varieties of wine available. One among these wines is the red wine which in recent days has been proven that it has a variety of benefits.

Increases the longevity of life:
Current data suggests that red icewine has an element in it which extends the longevity of life .An article research suggests that in 2000 there were more than 600 million people above the age of 60 years and this figure in 2025 will reach about 1.2 billion in 2025.

Smoking
Intense smoking damages the vessels and they tend to lose the natural ability to relax. However red wine has some beneficial impacts to remove the negative impact of smoking.

Effects on heart
One of the most proven and studied benefit of wine is that it is very much heart protective effect. Limited consumption of heart disease acts as a protection against the coronary heart disease. It reduces the production LDL (bad cholesterol) and it boosts the production of HDL (good cholesterol).

Blood clotting
Another very important feature of red wine is its ability towards anticlotting. Consumers who consume wine to light and moderate levels have lower levels of protein fibrinogen which promotes blood clot formation.

Hypertension
When the wine is consumed in excess it acts as a risk factor for hypertension .However there have been studies which have proved that if 250ml of wine is consumed along with the meal it can reduce the blood pressure in hypertensive persons.

Kidney stone formation
It also reduces the risk of kidney stone formation.

To conclude with I would not suggest everyone to drink wine wholeheartedly but I would
suggest that if you fall in the above situation that it would be a good idea to consume wines from Niagara on the Lake Wineries but in moderate quantity.

Wine and Food Pairing

The process of matching food and wine is highly subjective and inexact process. The old rules like having red wine with red meat and white wine with fish and poultry do not hold well these days because in this fast moving world experimentation regarding the match of wine with the food recipes and no one follows these hard and fast rules. The pairing could be on your own will and wish. You can hear the suggestion about the new mix and match suggestions on an everyday basis.

Vineyard tours and wine tastings are a great way to try to try the different wines and learn more as to which wine you favor the most. Then you can begin with trying the foods and wines you favor the most. While pairing food and wine, the goal is synergy and power. The wine should not overpower the food, and even the food should not overpower the wine.

Try and match the food with the wine in such a way that it flavors the food in a better way. Wine in itself tastes better than the food icewine has a similar significance as that of spice in food. Wine when drunk along with your food produces different sensations. A good match can bring out the nuances that can enhance the flavors and bring very good characteristics of both the food and wine.

Good food and wine pairing is achieved when there are similarities and contrasts between the taste and intensity.

Tips to Select the Wines

Wine selection is an important criterion essential in the wine festivals and all the other wine events. There are about three P’s which are essential in selecting the wines are as follows: Price, preference and pairing. These three P’s will definitely render you proper help in selecting some of the best wines from good niagara wineries.

Price: This is one of the key components useful in determining the amount you are willing to pay for the wine and it will also help you find the wine that is right in determining the right wine for you. Gone are the days where you could get some of the best wines at considerable price of about $30. These days you can even find a considerable good wine for $15 or even at a lesser amount so it is essential that you become really eye centric about the amount of the wines.

Preferences:This is what we all run behind sometimes even ignoring the price; these are ones which attracts our taste buds to the core. But as far as the wines are concerned then it is essential that you be concerned of the fact that who will drink the wine and what is the occasion for what you are sharing the wine are they new comers who are drinking the wine. Hence it is essential that you better find out all this then land up in a wine merchant’s shop or better wineries Niagara on the lake to buy the wine. Consider the fact for example that you are hosting a happy hour party then it is essential that you go in for safe drinks which are not much strong you can probably go in for the reds and white wine.

Pairing :In case you are looking out for wines specifically for the purpose of pairing with the dinners then it is essential that you take into account the key ingredients that you would be using for the dinner specifically.