Tasting Note:  I have come to really enjoy tasting Last House wines, for their complexity and acuity built on such a delicate frame. This pours pale but luminous cherry red. The nose captures incredibly pure red cherry, pomegranate seed and grape skin essence with berry patch herbals and shrub, some reductive/sulfidic flint and very fine oak spice, cinnamon and nutmeg, and cedar forest floor from the barrels. It is light bodied, effortlessly clean as in rainwater on rocks, very fresh yet coolly reserved. Acid is perfect, alcohol is a mere suggestion at 12%, and tannins are slightly sticky. The length is excellent. Certainly approachable now but should appeal for at least five years.

Backgrounder: Last House was founded in 2019 by retired grocery executive Andre Gagne and his wife Debra Matthews. They hired the original County pioneer Geoff Heinricks as a consultant and mentor. They purchased the property with its one-acre of vines in 2016, planted another 3.5 acres in 2018–19 and released their first vintage in 2019. The vineyard is metres from Lake Ontario in shallow clay loam over limestone bedrock (shown in the bottle shot). Practices in the vineyard and winery are low-intervention and hand done, with natural fermentations for both alcohol and malolactic.