Sugarbush Vineyards is a small family owned and operated vineyard and winery located in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada. The Prince Edward County Wine Region is the newest wine region in Ontario, and just became a designated viticultural area (DVA) in 2007.

Sugarbush Vineyards is fully owned and operated by Robert & Sally Peck. We are the garagiste winery of Prince Edward County.

Current:

Our tasting room is open Saturdays & Sundays from 11:00 am to 5 pm (November & December). Or you can always make an appointment, or drop by and see if we're around. We have eight wines available in our store (see below). We accept cash, VISA, and debit (sorry no Mastercard at this time).

The grapes are all picked, and fermenting merry away - another great season for the fruit!. We're now in our final mad dash of winter preparation of the vineyard; canes are being selected, tied down, and buried with earth before the ground freezes for the season.

We ship wine in cases of 6 bottles. Just email us with your order, and we will get back to you with shipping costs and payment methods. Christmas special on shipping: $6 per case in southern Ontario, and $10 per case outside of southern Ontario. Free delivery to the Ottawa area or anywhere along the 401 corridor between the County and Ottawa for all orders of 6 bottles or more.

We were one of six Ontario wineries (and the only one from Prince Edward County) selected this year to pour at the Ontario Legislature wine competition on November 5th, 2008. We poured our 2007 VQA Chardonnay and our 2007 VQA Cabernet Franc. Although we didn`t win, this was great exposure for us, especially considering the fact that the 2007 vintage was only our second commercial vintage.

Upcoming Events:

Wassail weekends in the county: November 22&23 and November 29&30. Drop by our store for mulled wine, Christmas baking, stocking stuffers, and of course to fill your Christmas wine needs.

Wines available in our retail store:

Our 2007 vintages are entirely from grapes hand harvested from our vineyard.

Our bottle prices include all taxes and the 20¢ bottle deposit.

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. For the next couple of years you will have to make the trip to our retail store at our winery to sample our wines. In the next few years we will reach our peak production of 1500 cases/year - at which point you will be able to enjoy our wines at a number of Eastern Ontario restaurants as well.

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 the best strategy to maintain a healthy vineyard in our climate is to use a combination of organic and inorganic fungicides and insecticides 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 2.5 - 4 acres of vines in 2010/2011 time frame.

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).

We were expecting our first harvest in the fall of 2004, but some pesky raccoons managed to eat their way through our entire vineyard. We now have an electric fence to keep them out! The winter of 2004/05 was unusually cold and it damaged most of our fruiting buds. We ended up harvesting just over 200 kg of Gamay and Cabernet Franc in the fall of 2005. A small amount, when you consider that our vineyard will be producing around 20 tonnes/year when the vines are fully mature.

Our vines have survived well, even though we had three cold winters in a row (2003-2005). The cold winters forced us to bring up new shoots from the base of the vine each spring, and made us re-evaluate, and change, our trellis system to use very low cane and fruiting wires. We are now burying 2-4 canes on each plant to ensure bud survival over the winter.

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