Our first vineyard, the one we began planting on Victoria Day 2001, giving rise to its name, Victoria Block. Coincidentally, Victoria is also the name of Bob and Diana Granger’s daughter, making the name even more fitting.

Preparation of this field began in 2000, a process that involved plowing under and cultivating the alfalfa growing there after its first cut. Our reasoning behind this was to reintroduce some nitrogen into the very shallow soils that make up this vineyard. Soil depths range from 12 – 18 inches over most of the field. We were not concerned with the reemergence of the alfalfa because everyone told us it was very fragile and would not survive the plowing and cultivating process.

It took us 4 years to manually remove the reemerging alfalfa from this block, however we are happy to report there has been very little in the vineyard this year.

Victoria Block was originally planted with 5,000 Chardonnay vines clone 76 on SO4 and 3,750 Gamay Noir vines clone 509 on SO4 and a small experimental block for Loyalist College. An additional 2,500 Gamay vines were planted in 2004, this time clone 565 in 2002 and a small experimental block of Pinot Noir clone 375 also on SO4 in 2003.

The Gamay in this field will be cropped at around 4 tonnes to the acre although there are years it would like to crop more resulting in production from this field of between 20 and 25 tonnes per year. These grapes are used in our Trumpour’s Mill Gamay Noir a fairly light red made in a Beaujolais style, in our red wine Rosé blended with pinot noir and in the Assemblage Red our version of barbeque wine.

We expect the Chardonnay to crop at around 2.5 tonnes to the acre or about 10 tonnes of fruit per year. It is the fruit from this block that is used to create our barrel fermented chardonnay and it is expected that soon this wine will move to a Grange of Prince Edward label.