If you’re an oenophile — that’s connoisseur-speak for those of us for whom wine is more personality than aperitif — then you’ve probably been on a wine tour or two. Likely somewhere in the Okanagan Valley, where Syrah and Riesling flow like the glacier-fed spring water that sustains the region’s bounty of vineyards.
Some of the most vino obsessed among us will fly or drive all the way to the B.C. interior for a spectacular wine tour.
Lucky for us, then, that you don’t actually need to travel very far at all to taste the terroir of wine country. In fact, there’s a wine tour right in our own backyard that offers bouquets you won’t taste anywhere else.
That place is Beau Bella Winery.
Offering winery tours each weekend — 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., Saturday and Sunday — Beau Bella Winery is just minutes away from Edmonton’s Summerside neighbourhood in bucolic Leduc County. That proximity makes it a convenient and alluring weekend “staycation” for even those with the most discerning of palates.
Specializing in wines grown and bottled right here in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. They have all the merlots and sauvignon blancs that you might expect a wine tour to have, but where Beau Bella really shines is in its eclectic selection of fruit wines.
“Everyone thinks fruit wines are sweet and sugary, but people are amazed when they try them because the yeast takes all that sugar away,” says Ann Johnsen, the founder and owner-operator of Beau Bella Winery. “We’ve had people come in and say ‘no, I don’t like fruit wine. I’m not drinking that’ and then they leave with a case of wine at the end.”
Tours cost just $15 per person and typically last between 25 minutes and a couple of hours, depending on how long you spend sipping on the veranda overlooking the winery’s idyllic prairieland. That means you’ll have plenty of time to sample the various vintages, from Saskatoon berry to rhubarb, pear, haskap, cherry, black currant and raspberry — the latter of which have been growing for longer than many of us have been alive.
“I’ve had [the raspberry plants] for 44 years,” Johnsen says. “My mother-in-law grew them on their farm and the plants are about 92 years old now.”
If you’re looking to liven up your wine cellar, or just toast to something new, you can book a Beau Bella tour.
