The day we invented Wassail

The early years of the Prince Edward County wine region
By Richard Johnston

The first time someone greeted me with “Wassail” in late November, I realized the County wine industry had become part of local culture and calendar, and grinning I returned the greeting.

Trying to start up a new wine region in an area that had been considered to be too cold to grow the vinifera grapes—those treasured in renowned areas like Burgundy or the Loire in France—was challenging in so many ways. It wasn’t just a matter of inventing new ways to grow the grapes so they would make objectively delicious wine and survive our harsher winters.

Our band of oenophile risk-takers also had to establish the region as a unique and credible alternative to Niagara. We spent all sorts of time discussing how we should do that. At some point in the future much will be written about the strategies we employed without the financial resources usually relied upon. It is a great success story.

But, we are in November, so I thought I would focus on the invention of Wassail.

As we would primarily be relying on on-site retail sales to survive, we needed more than the traditional two- to four-month County summer tourism season for attracting customers. So we focused on expanding into the shoulder seasons. We decided to bracket our wine sales season with a launch event in the spring and a wrap-up celebration in the fall after the campers and cottagers had gone home.

Deciding on a May launch was perfect because that would be about when the new wines made from the previous fall harvest would be bottled and it would get people to the County almost two months before the summer holidays. By calling it “Terroir”, the distinctive tastes and attributes of local soils and micro-environments, we were declaring that we would be different than Niagara.

Choosing a fall event and timing was more challenging. Other areas had harvest celebrations. We couldn’t compete with Niagara’s huge events for a harvest that was a couple of weeks in advance of ours. Besides. we knew people would gradually want to come on their own for harvest time even without an event. There had always been a bit of an influx here for the apple harvest.

If we really wanted to extend the season our event would have to be later. We were going to be crazy busy getting the harvest off, fermenting wine, and then burying the vines for winter protection before the cold really hit. Members of the Prince Edward County Winegrowers Association (PECWA), of which I was chair, were really split on what to do.

Then it came to me. What made us distinct from all other wine regions, was in fact, that we had to bury our vines. Why not base the closing event for the season on that reality? But how do you make it fun and attractive?

Did anyone else actually celebrate shutting down an agricultural venture for the winter? Then I remembered the tradition of Wassail that had begun in the apple orchards of England hundreds of years ago and realized we could adapt it to our situation.

The orchard workers would load up with cider and other grog, and then troop from estate to estate begging for food and more hooch from the various orchard owners. They would choose a King and Queen of the Wassail and hoist them up into the trees in each vineyard, fill a hollowed-out loaf of bread with cider and toast the past harvest and the harvests yet to come. And they would sing and cavort about as they went. In fact, wassail was the precursor to caroling, that became big in the 19th century.

We didn’t have to do much to tweak that old format to meet our needs. Our customers would play the part of the orchard workers and come around to each of our tasting rooms. We would encourage them to sing by offering a free taste to anyone who sang even a portion of a wintry song and we would provide comfort food for them to eat and serve mulled wines so they had something warm in their tummies.

It would allow each participating winery to put their own imprint on the event with their decorating and food choices, and would bring potential wine buyers to their location in late November, when the County was empty (Terroir was held centrally at the Crystal Palace). We would just hold it on weekends and end before the heavy rural darkness fell.

PECWA selected a King and Queen of the Wassail each year, and gave them festive crowns made by an artist on Rednersville Rd. They got to keep their crowns, but the loving cup we gave them was to be passed on each year for the new wassail royalty to toast the harvest just passed and the successful burying to guarantee there would be a crop the following year.

I even adapted the traditional Wassailing song and had printouts for people to sing when they arrived.

“Here we come a-wassailing among the vines so fine Here we come a-wassailing to sample your good wine”

It was a huge success. We were right in thinking that people often found November to be one of the most depressing months—dark, cold, and a presage of a long winter to come. This applied as much to County folk as it did those from away. They needed an excuse to celebrate, as did the exhausted vineyard workers who had been tying down canes in the cold and fearfully ploughing dirt over the vines before the ground froze solid. But given the inclement weather and sometime snowstorms, we decided to spread the event over the three weekends, the last two in November and the first in December to make sure weather didn’t kill the concept in the bud.

We chose those three weekends as well so that the first overlapped with the last weekend of Countylicious, and the last led into the Christmas party season, guaranteeing our hospitality industry an extended influx of visitors. Before Covid hit, buses dropped revellers off in great numbers.

Now Wassail is back. A County tradition revived. Time once more to brush off the pre-winter blues.This year, Wassail takes place on November 18 and 19, November 25 and 26 and Dec 2 and 3. Visit pecwines.com for more information.