The Do-It-All Canadian Winery

Prince Edward County’s Trail Estate Winery offers a full range of wines.

Writer John Clegg

The best wineries tend to be specialists. Whether because of stringent regulations in the Old World or limited bandwidth in the New World, superlative wines are often the product of a particular devotion to a limited number of grapes and styles. However, every once in a while, a winery finds a way to achieve high quality across a broad array of wines, and its achievement is all the more impressive for it. Prince Edward County’s Trail Estate Winery is one of those generalist success stories.

Founded by proprietors Anton and Hildegard Sproll in 2011, and now overseen by their son Alex, Trail Estate Winery has been at the fore of Prince Edward Country’s transition from novelty to serious player on the Canadian wine scene. But it wasn’t until 2015, when Mackenzie Brisbois, the current winemaker and vineyard manager, joined the team, that Trail Estate began to form its unique identity. A Prince Edward County native, Brisbois has forged a philosophy for Trail Estate that is focused around pragmatic sustainable viticultural and winemaking practices for both the winery’s premium and experimental offerings.

As vineyard manager, Brisbois tends to Trail Estate’s vines with a mix of agricultural styles, ranging from conventional to esoteric. The result is a philosophy that tends toward organic but leaves room for course correction in the case of adverse weather and growing conditions. The wines are similarly indefinable. Made with maligned hybrid grapes, regal Burgundian varieties, and everything in between, Trail Estate’s wines range from outlandishly fun to deadly serious. Among them, a slew of pét-nats (short for pétillant naturel, French for “naturally sparkling”), piquettes, and orange wines keep the adventurous imbiber sated, while single-vineyard chardonnay, pinot noir, and cabernet franc, as well as traditional method sparkling wines, satisfy the conventional palate.

One of Trail Estate’s most unconventional wines, Supersonic, relies on a grape that is known more as a type of jelly than a component of serious bottles of vino. The Concord grape, the indigenous North American variety on which Smucker’s built its empire, was once the backbone of the Canadian wine industry. It has since fallen by the wayside, making room for Vitis vinifera grapes such as chardonnay and pinot noir, and now only a few serious wineries vinify it at all. But Trail Estate, with its focus on real rather than vain sustainability, has made it a core part of its portfolio with Supersonic, its very lightly sparkling take on the grape.

Cold hardy, disease resistant, and vigorous, Concord is an ideal bumper variety in Prince Edward County, where inclement weather can severely limit vinifera production. The problem? Wines produced from it often have a “foxy” note, a musky, wet-animal flavour common among almost all North American grape varieties. But in Brisbois’s deft hands, the difficult grape renders a wine that is both “clean” and idiosyncratic at the same time. “We don’t try and make Concord into a pinot noir-style wine,” Brisbois says. What she does do is make Concord grapes into a buoyant, everyday wine. The 2024 vintage of Supersonic—which was especially light on the bubbles and so packaged in lighter bottles for sustainability reasons—is just 8 per cent alcohol by volume and awash with cherry cola and tart strawberry flavours.

On the other end of the spectrum, Trail Estate’s premium County wines offer all the joys of wines from world-renowned appellations but with qualities that accentuate the character of Prince Edward County. The 2022 County Chardonnay V6, sourced entirely from Trail Estate’s home vineyard, underlies the distinctive minerality of the region’s wines, a feature many attribute to its clay and limestone soils, a blend similar to Burgundy’s. Aged on its lees in used French oak barrels before being bottled unfined and unfiltered, this vintage of Trail Estate’s County Chardonnay proves that hands-off winemaking can lead to resoundingly complex wines. In this case, it’s one whose mineral palate also features lemon meringue and bruised apple flavours atop a stark, acidic intensity.

According to Brisbois, Trail Estate Winery isn’t “reinventing the wheel in terms of winemaking,” but drink any of its wines and you’ll quickly find that it isn’t exactly orthodox either. Thanks to its generalist approach built on a platform of pragmatic sustainability in the vineyards, and hands-off techniques in the winery, both its conventional and experimental wines offer drinking experiences that can be downright otherworldly.