Three of our wines are now VQA approved!
Pinot Noir 2013, Pinot X2 2013 and Chard 2013 (the Chard is still subject to label approval — a tiny tweak is necessary — but passed the VQA taste panel and the laboratory analysis).
We don’t have labels printed yet but what the heck, we thought we’d let the world know anyway.
The Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) is a regulatory agency responsible for maintaining the integrity of local wine appellations and enforcing winemaking and labeling standards. Membership and approvals are expensive and time consuming for a small winery – a couple thousand dollars and weeks and weeks. But we think the organization serves a valuable purpose for our customers. When you buy one of our VQA wines, you can be confident of the origin and that the quality of the wine in the bottle is true to type.
“Prince Edward County” is a protected VQA term, so we weren’t allowed to use it to market our original non-VQA wines. We even avoided using it on the web site. The regional name is protected, just like it would be wrong to call a sparkling wine “Champagne” if it came from anywhere other than that region in France. There are many restricted terms – we aren’t even allowed to use the word “vineyard” on our non-VQA labels! This was a really tough restriction for us since we believe in the notions of terroir and uniqueness of place of origin. And when we talked about our dream of “living on a farm in the country” what we really wanted to say was “living on a vineyard in the County”.
But now we can let people know that our VQA wines are 100% made from grapes we grow ourselves in our vineyards in Prince Edward County, not blended, diluted, or imported.
The wines are delicious. We can hardly wait to get those labels made and to share them with you!
brokenstone.ca 
Sent from my. Congratulations!! Can’t wait to taste it! Joanna Sirois
Congratulaions.Your hard work has paid off. Irene.
Congratulations, I remember tank testing the 2013 a month after it went in. It was delicious even at that point. Will it be available in the Rossmore LCBO?
Hi Veronica! Great to hear from you. We are working on getting wines in the LCBO but we haven’ t yet. We didn’t print a bar code on the label, so the Pinot Noir 2013 will only be available through our store at the winery. It’s possible that we’ll have one of our 2014 Pinot Noirs in selected LCBO stores, but earliest would likely be 2016.
Our Chardonnay 2014 has a bar code, so we’ll apply to the LCBO to stock it – that’s one of this year’s big learning experiences for us — how to get the LCBO to stock our wines. We’re bottling the Chardonnay on April 29.