Tawse Winery Inc.

Tawse is a family-owned estate winery situated on the lower slopes of the Niagara Escarpment.  At Tawse we unite traditional winemaking techniques with state-of-the-art technology to create wines of exceptional elegance, depth and character.   At Tawse, winemaking begins in the vineyards. We use organic and biodynamic farming techniques to ensure the health of our vines and the vitality of our soils.  Biodynamic farming is an approach that sees the vineyard as its own self-sustaining ecological entity  It's based on traditional agricultural practices such as planting and harvesting at certain points in the lunar calendar.   Much of our fruit is sourced from old growth, low yield vines, giving our wines great depth, richness and character .Our grapes are harvested at optimal ripeness and are hand-picked and hand-sorted. The first sorting is done right in the field , so trimmings are returned to the land before processing. Our reds are de-stemmed before pressing and our whites are gently whole cluster pressed to avoid the bitter characteristics from the stems, skins and seeds.   Once the fruit arrives at the winery, we use a six level gravity flow processing system based on the natural slope and contours of our property. The use of gravity as opposed to pumps allows the wine to move gently from pressing to bottling with minimum manipulation. Our wine is aged in three cellars covered by 6 to 8 feet of earth, which keeps the ambient temperature between 10 and 16 degrees Celsius, with a natural humidity of around 85%. This relatively stable temperature and high humidity allows our wines to age gracefully in barrel with a minimum amount of evaporation over the 18-month cellaring period.