All photos by the author.
It’s late Friday night after an hour’s drive from Toronto, and we’re pulling up to a beautiful black house on a vineyard. François Morissette, the owner and winemaker at Pearl Morisette—located in Jordan, Ontario—has left the front door to his house unlocked for us to drop our things, relax, and sleep until it’s time to hang out and drink wine tomorrow afternoon.
I rarely drink Canadian wines. They’re either hard to find, and in many cases, not that great for what you’re paying for. It took a few visits to Maison Publique, a small neighborhood restaurant in Montreal—which has one of the greatest Canadian wine lists—to discover Pearl Morisette, which has given me hope for the future of Canadian winemaking.
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Not far from Niagara Falls, the vineyard is making pretty interesting stuff, from gamays to cabernet francs and chardonnays that taste like they’ve been flown in from Europe.
My girlfriend and I sleep for nearly 12 hours until we hear noise from downstairs. Dan Hadida, chef at the vineyard, is here. “I’m starting a new project. I want to make some cider today,” he announces while crushing apples to get the juice and start fermenting them. “All the trimmings go to the pigs after I’m done because we want them to eat the best stuff around and be happy.” I start cooking some scrambled eggs, sautéd potatoes with kale, cultured butter, and fruits for all of us. We sit down to eat and Hadida starts to explain what he’s up to at the vineyard after working in top kitchens around the world, from Septime in Paris to Pujol in Mexico. “Right now, we are developing an event space dedicated to wine and food,” he explains. “We want to do dinners with chefs from around the world—cooking with what’s around us paired with the best wine Canada has to offer.” Presumably, Pearl Morissette wine.
Before François Morisette shows up to give us a tour of the vineyard, Dan shows us the farm, from the roaming pigs to the cows and open fields. But now we’ve got questions about the wine and the vines that they come from. “I will let François answer you on everything wine, because he’s the man.”
Before his Canadian winemaking began, François Morissette, a Quebec native, was working at different vineyards in France, from Pommard, Meursault, and Chambolle-Musigny for a total of eight vintages. He and his family had not planned to come back to Canada until a friend of his told him about a certain Mr. Pearl who wanted to invest in a winery in Niagara. “I’ll give you the money and I’ll have no say in anything you do with the wine,” Pearl promised. François had doubts about what he could accomplish in Ontario, but after meeting with Pearl, he thought he would give it a shot. In 2007, Morissette and his family moved to Ontario and made his first pinot noir in Canada that year.
Since then, they’ve stripped all the gamay vines in order to re-plant the right “clones” for terroir, raised the dying orchard—where the animals now live—added five acres of pinot noir at high density after two years of research to choose the right genetic material, two acres of chardonnay, two acres of cabernet franc, and planted riesling on fallow land in 2015. This guy’s been busy.
François takes a few bottles from the winery and sits down at the “adult’s table” in the barn. We follow and start tasting chardonnay, riesling, pinot, cab franc and nerd out a bit from being able to try it all in his presence. His wines are straight, balanced, oxidative, and natural. “I hate being categorized as a “natural” [winemaker] because there is so much shit being done that can’t last a day after opened,” he explains. “My wines get better after a certain time that they’ve been opened.” Indeed, comparing two bottles of the same chardonnay, one opened three days before and one opened today, I can noticed huge differences. The oldest one is fresh and round with a nice acidity while the one that was opened today is a bit more confined, but still really interesting. He opens a cuvée métis—half pinot noir, half cab franc. “Nobody puts them together in France or anywhere else because they are from two different regions,” he explains. “But here, we’re free, we’re not Cartesian like the French. If it’s good, it’s good!”
After tasting bottle after bottle, Morissette takes us to the winery, where he promises he has “some cool stuff to show” us. “For years, I was not confident enough about my wines so I was never drinking them, but now I know them better play with them a bit.” François brings us into the back where he has two big barrels, one amphora, one oak, and pours a glass from the amphora barrel: a light orange liquid comes out. A three-and-a-half month and a half skin contact orange wine, which is zippy and fresh, tastes like summer. In the other barrel, the cuvée solera is an assemblage of all the ugly ducklings of chardonnay since 2008, and tastes like an apple-y, fresh white wine.
Unfortunately for us Canadians, buying Canadian wines in Canada is a pretty complicated thing if you’re not a restaurant. “It is easier for us to sell our wines in Hong Kong than in the rest of Canada, and Ontario is basically my only big market,” Morissette angrily explains. “It’s killing a market when it should promote it.”
The sun is slowly setting and after all that wine, we’re starving. François grabs a few more bottles for good measure and joins us for a feast of pork knuckles, Swiss chard, sweet potatoes, homemade bread, and of course, his amazing wine. In between talks about terroir, the Canadian identity, and wine regulations, I realize that François is ready to show the world what he is made of.
