Sugarbush Vineyards is a small family owned (Robert & Sally Peck) and operated vineyard and winery located in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada.  We are the garagiste winery of Prince Edward County.

Garagiste:\GA-razh-EEST\ n. fr.
A passionate winemaker who creates limited production premium wine in a garage-sized winery.

Come visit the county's garagiste winery and see that you don't need a big space to produce great wines.

We specialize in small lot, artisanal wines made entirely from our estate-grown grapes.

Current:

Our tasting room is open daily 10:30am - 5:30pm. Or later, if the open flag is out (May through October).

We've just released our Almost Red VQA 2009 & Riesling/Gewürztraminer VQA 2009.

We have free delivery to Ottawa each week and to Toronto on the last Friday of each month.  You can call, email, or use our web page to order wine.

Check out some of the great funktional art and design that we have for sale in our tasting room (courtesy of Covent Garden).

Of Interest:

On May 28th, 2010, our 2007 Pinot Noir was featured by Konrad Ejbich on CBC Radio's Ontario Today wine phone-in.

A few quotes from the programme:

     Beautiful drinking now and for the next 2 to 3 years.

     A brilliant wine – a great drinking wine.

     It was hard for me to decide which wine to put on the show – their ’07 Pinot Noir or
     their ’07 Cabernet Franc – they were both so good.

Newsletter:

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Business Strategy:

We are striving to produce small quantities of hand-crafted premium-quality wines sourced entirely from our vineyard.  We start producing premium wines in our vineyard where we limit grape yields to 2 - 2.5 tonnes/acre.

You will never find us in your local LCBO store.  We want to be able to manage & perform all aspects of our operation and, at the same time, have an enjoyable lifestyle.  In order to do this, we need to stay small.  Our wines are only available at our retail store and at a number of Eastern Ontario restaurants.  In the next few years we will reach our peak production of 1500 cases/year.

Our vineyard is herbicide free.  All of our weed control is performed manually.  We keep mowed grass down our alleys, and use a grape hoe and hand hoes to remove weeds between each vine in the row.  This is more expensive and time consuming, but is much better for the long term health of our farm.

Although we would like to be totally organic, we have found that it is a very difficult proposition.  We only use organic insecticides (kaolin clay for leaf hoppers; pheromone mate disrupting ties for grape berry moths), but in order to maintain a healthy vineyard in our climate we use a combination of organic and inorganic fungicides during the growing season.

History:

We planted 8.5 acres of vines (Cabernet Franc, Gamay, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, and Gewürztraminer) during 2002 and 2003.  We're planning to plant an additional 3 acres of vines in 2012.

We have been performing all of the labour on the vineyard with help from friends, family and small staff (usually 2 full time workers in the summer months).

Our first harvest was the fall of 2006. This is the only harvest that we have purchased and processed grapes that weren't grown on our property - as our vineyard had a small crop due to winter damage. This small harvest made us re-evalutate and change our trellis system to use very low cane and fruiting wires. We now bury 2-4 canes per plant to ensure bud survival over the winter - this is a tedious task but well worth the effort.

We opened our winery retail store in September 2007.

Since 2007 we have only processed grapes from our vineyard. Now that we have a reliable strategy for burying our vines over the winter months, our vineyard produces very consistently (14 - 18 tonnes/year).

Sugarbush Vineyards was picked for our vineyard name, as the back 6-7 acres of our 48 acre property contains sugar Maples.