Hinterland Wine Company

Hinterland Wine Company makes sparkling wine and very little else. In a Prince Edward County crowded with wineries pouring a full slate of reds, whites, and rosés, that single-mindedness is the whole reason to turn off onto Closson Road. The tasting room, set in a former barn, pours traditional-method cuvées beside Charmat releases and ancestral-method rosés — one subject, approached several ways. For a traveller mapping a County wine route, the focus is the appeal: a table can taste clear across a category in an afternoon without ever leaving the subject of sparkling.

The bottle list reads as a tour of method. Les Étoiles, the flagship, is built in the traditional method from estate Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Gris — the grapes and the second-fermentation-in-bottle approach that underpin serious sparkling everywhere. Blanc de Blancs takes the same traditional path from Chardonnay alone. Borealis and Whitecap come from the Charmat method, where the bubbles take shape in tank, giving lighter, fruit-forward wines made to be opened young. Ancestral Rosé works in the ancestral method, the oldest and least predictable of the styles, finishing its single fermentation in the bottle, and an unfiltered col-fondo bottling called Fizzle pushes that idea further by pouring cloudy on purpose. There are still wines too — a Chardonnay called the Walleye, a Pinot Noir called Little Bat — but they read as the exceptions that prove where the attention goes.

The spread across methods is what separates Hinterland from a winery that simply happens to bottle a sparkling cuvée or two. Traditional, Charmat, and ancestral are not interchangeable; each leaves its own signature in the glass, and lining them up turns a tasting into something closer to a short lesson in how bubbles get made. The Three Method Tasting Flight formalizes exactly that, letting a visitor move from tank to bottle to ancestral in one sitting and taste the differences rather than read about them, while the Pretty in Pink flight does the same work for anyone who arrives knowing only that they like rosé. For a visitor working through a dozen County tasting rooms in a weekend, the clarity is a relief — a stop with a single subject and an obvious way in. The menu itself carries the case for why one small winery chose to specialize.

The specialization traces back to Jonas Newman and Vicki Samaras, who founded Hinterland in 2007 and, by the winery's own account, converted a former barn into the cellar and tasting room that stand on Closson Road today. Newman makes the wine. Choosing sparkling and almost nothing else was an unusual bet when the County's wine scene was still young, and the decision has shaped everything downstream — the grapes in the ground, the equipment in the cellar, the rhythm of the visit. The barn keeps a kind of physical memory in the place, a reminder that this was farmland before it was a winery.

What the visit is not is a restaurant. Hinterland keeps no full kitchen, and guests are welcome to bring their own food to pair with a flight — a quietly generous arrangement that suits the unhurried pace. The patio looks out over the vineyard rows, the chairs are the wide wooden kind built for lingering, and anyone who would rather not study the methods can simply order a frozen peach bellini and watch the afternoon go. Most tables stretch a tasting into an hour or two before carrying a few bottles home, and a wine club sends the County's bubbles to those who can't make the drive. It is the kind of stop that rewards arriving without a schedule, where the only real decision is which method to start with.