The Falls, Niagara that is: Toronto Day 11 (3 May 2014)

The last Saturday of our holiday – both in Toronto, and indeed overall – had long been planned as meet Hannah’s friend Lisa, she who lured Hannah to Toronto with hints of work opportunities, and visit Niagara Falls. And this is indeed what we did.

Niagara Falls

We picked up Hannah and Lisa at Hannah’s place at 10 am and hit the road in our rental Toyota Corolla. It was a grey, inclement day with rain forecast, but we were hopeful. It’s freeway pretty much the whole 125km so we arrived without drama around 11.30, parked, and set off on foot for the falls, avoiding the casinos and the tacky tourist exhortations in between. First, you see the American Falls which look pretty dramatic, but if you cast your eyes along the path ahead you see the main Horseshoe Falls … and you stop and look and take photos every few metres just in case they stop before you get there! Or, to be serious, just to take a moment to look at them from different positions. It was busy, but being still off-season it wasn’t so crowded that you couldn’t get good views wherever you stopped. At one point the mist was blowing so heavily across the path we thought it might have been raining, given the look of the sky, but no, it was just the power of the falls. They are magnificent, as many of you already know, of course. The colour resembles a beautiful green glass, and the white mist is atmospheric. We enjoyed looking at it from the very top and watching the water fall over.

We didn’t do any of the tours. We think the Maid of the Mist wasn’t operating anyhow and, really, once we’d seen the falls we wanted to get out of there, and go to …

Niagara-on-the-Lake

This pretty little town at the mouth of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River, had been recommended by “everyone”. It was to be our lunch and wine-tasting destination. Not quite knowing how our day was going to pan out – given the weather and the fact that there were four of us – we hadn’t made any specific lunch plans. After tossing up between two places in the village, we probably didn’t choose the best place to eat – Shaw Cafe and Wine Bar – but the food came promptly and was served cheerily. Hannah was able to do her thing of choosing the weirdest thing she could find on the menu, this time White Chocolate Scone with Smoked Salmon. Go, Hannah, we all cheered, as we chose somewhat more traditional fare.

We enjoyed the conversation over lunch, particularly picking Lisa’s brains over things Canadian, as she’s a public servant working close to Cabinet. We wanted to know about alternative energy action here as, funnily enough, Canada, unlike Spain, does not seem rife with solar panels! She said that water and wind is where their main action lies, which makes perfect sense to us given our experience here. She also said that recent research had come in indicating that wind energy/wind farms did not have detrimental effects on real-estate values. We also learnt that the previous afternoon, Ontario province’s first woman/first openly gay premier, Kathleen Wynne, had called an early election as her minority government had failed to pass its budget. Hmm …

We drove briefly to the park that overlooks the lake-river mouth but the weather wasn’t conducive to enjoying nature. It was, though, suitable to wine-tasting. We decided two wineries would be our lot for the afternoon so Sue chose Stratus, a modern sustainable winery, and Lisa chose Pillitteri which is her favourite and famous for Ice Wine. Ice wine, we learnt, is a sweet wine made from grapes that have been left to freeze on the vine. Apparently, the sugars do not freeze, but the water does, resulting in more concentrated juice being pressed from the frozen grapes. It is best drunk as a dessert wine – at least to Sue’s palate. According to Wikipedia, there are indications that wine was made from frozen grapes back in Ancient Roman days.

We discovered that here in Canada, like the US, you tend to pay for your tasting. At Stratus, they offered four tastings for $10, so the three girls shared that, with driver Len abstaining. We tried their Gewürztraminer (the young of the party chose one of those each), their higher end  2012 Chardonnay (guess who chose that?), and a sweeter wine called Stratus Mosaic (which blends Gewürztraminer, Riesling and Semillon). Sue rather enjoyed her Chardonnay but at $48 per bottle decided that her favourite Aussie wines do just as well. Pillitteri, by contrast, did not charge for tasting. Thomas, the very cute server (who captured Hannah’s heart when he was able to pair every sweet ice wine with confectionery such as Kit Kats and other foods like beef jerky) told us that they don’t charge for tasting, focussing instead on finding people’s likes in order to encourage them to buy. It worked. None of us bought wines at Stratus (whose wine prices were generally in the stratosphere) but we bought about 6 bottles between us at Pillitteri, where, admittedly, the prices were rather cheaper.

Home again, home again …

By the time we’d finished tasting it was late afternoon and we were all ready to head homeward. We did try to find a coffee place in the cute little village of Virgil but they’d run out of most of their bakery offerings so we pushed on. Len, though, did need a coffee halfway home so it was a brief stop at a Tim Horton’s (Canada’s answer to Starbucks) to revive the driver, before continuing the return trip. By the time we dropped off Lisa, and then Hannah, and then bought some food to keep us going, it was around 7pm. A good day … we met the lovely Lisa, saw one of the world’s great sights, and explored a new wine region. What was there not to like?

Today’s slideshow …

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And a video shot at Niagara Falls …