Grant: Engage Grants Program

Sprucewood Shores Winery, a family-owned winery founded in 2007, is a leading innovator in wine production in the Lake Erie North Shore wine region located in Amherstburg Ontario with an annual production of 15,000 cases. Sprucewood is aiming to produce a premium concentrated Ontario wine made in the Appassimento- and ripasso styles. This involves concentrating the flavours prior to making the wine by air-drying the grapes, removing water. It has been a traditional wine-making technique used in Northern Italy to make Amarone. The techniques are ideally suited to Canadian wine and could help provide a new premium product to consumers across the country. Despite centuries of practice, the precise conditions that lead to optimal drying are unclear, and this is especially true regarding the nature, activity, and condition-dependence of wild yeast during the drying process, and the effect of different drying parameters on undesirable mold growth. This collaboration between the winery and the University of Windsor aims to delineate these factors so as to improve the quality and ensure the reproducibility of this product into the future.