Tasting Note Encountered twice, and lifting the roof off both times, this ranks in my top three most memorable Canadian pinots in 2025. It is a gorgeous PEC/Niagara blend, with 70% from Norm Hardie PEC vineyards, and 30% from Niagara. As a result, it is labeled as Ontario VQA, not Prince Edward County. Lovely, vaulting aromatics are perfectly pitched with well sewn cherry-raspberry fruit, cedar, woodsy/mulchy greens, barrel spice and vanilla. On the palate it is supple, glossy, elegant and focused with very finely integrated tannin. And the length is outright outstanding. It was a quite warm, concentrated vintage, making this wine approachable now, but likely to age well past 2035.
Backgrounder Norman Hardie put down roots in 2003 in PEC after seven years as a sommelier at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel and another seven years apprenticing in Burgundy, Oregon, New Zealand… wherever pinot was being made. I have followed his career since I first met him as a student in a wine course I taught in the early 1990s. His first vintage from the clay limestone soils on Greer Road was 2004, and the acclaim came swiftly in the years following both from local and international writers. Norman Hardie is one of the most successful Canadian wineries in international markets today. Everything about his approach is detailed and painstaking, from low-yield harvesting of only the best grapes, to low-intervention techniques in the winery, with natural yeasts, full lees contact, and an extended two-year barrel elèvage for his pinot noirs, which is longer than most.
