What a strange and lovely day on Friday. I drove down to Prince Edward County in a posh rented car. The sun shone, though not avidly enough to melt the snow, and the farther I got from Toronto, the more empty the roads became. I must have passed two cars in the twenty minutes from Hillier to Picton and none at all once I found the road to Waupoos. It really was a pristine morning, the empty fields white and silent. Only the clean blue sky was busy with long, wavering dotted lines of geese making their way back northwards, looking for open water and last year’s grass beneath the rime.
Waupoos winery was a tad surreal, too: all dressed-up but completely solitary on the County’s uttermost peninsular, unvisited, gearing up for Easter in the tasting room with elaborate chocolate eggs and pours of their maple-infused Icewine for today’s PEC maple syrup festival. The new winemaker at Waupoos is 24-year-old Amy Dickinson. Yes, she’s 24… She works pretty much alone, year-round, in the cellar/tank-room/lab under the winery. Luckily she is super-smart and self-possessed and knows her business remarkably well. I’ll be writing a profile of her in the Autumn issue of Food & Drink.
Driving home again, retracing my steps just an hour or two later, I really didn’t want to leave the County. Every time I go down there it seems like such a particular and special place. In all these years, I’ve never visited during the tourist season, which may account for the image it offers in my memory – as a landscape of solitude, rather high-strung and self-conscious – and carefully separate.