In Season: Wine a great sweetener during trip

Half to three-quarters of the water flowing into Niagara Falls is diverted to generate electricity, slowing erosion of the rock ledge to 1 foot a year, rather than 3 to 5 feet.

Hundreds of wineries in Niagara, meanwhile, divert a significant portion of their grape crop to make a syrupy, sweet dessert wine called ice wine or icewine.

My wife, Sandy, and I enjoyed both the falls and the Niagara Peninsula wineries last week on a trip to Ontario. The last time, nine years ago, was a marathon camping trip with the kids.

Our favorite wines are semi-dry and dry reds from a half-dozen Sonoma wineries we visited in 2006. We also like wines produced in Jackson County, Paw Paw and the Grand Traverse region, and have toured tasting rooms throughout Michigan.

Michigan vintners make a small amount of ice wine, a variety of grape wines, and fruit wines from cherries, blackberries, peaches and blueberries.

The Niagara region of Ontario is famous for ice wine, and markets it at every turn. Coupon booklets across the province carry dozens of "free icewine tasting" coupons. Wineries there typically charge $1 to $8 per taste, and sell ice wine for $30 to $75 a bottle, and the bottles are petite.

In contrast, Michigan, Sonoma and Napa wineries generally do not charge a tasting fee and depend more on bottle or case sales. The tasting fees in Niagara were discouraging.

Most wine grapes in the Niagara region are pressed by the end of September. White and red grapes for ice wine are left hanging until the temperature drops into the teens in December or January. The fruit is pressed frozen, so that ice is discarded and the thickest, sweetest juice remains.

The result is a concentrated wine that is sipped in small amounts with chocolate or dessert after dinner. My wife happily drank my samples in the wine-tasting rooms. The stuff is just too sweet for me. A few of the heaviest cabernets and a few pinot noirs and a pinot gamay were more to my liking.

Some of Ontario's 600 grape producers date to the 1800s, and its wine history is 200 years old. One of the best stops on our tour was Ravine Winery in Queenston, featuring an 18th-century house that was burned in the War of 1812. It was rebuilt and moved twice, the last time in a five-year process. A celebrity chef just opened a restaurant next door.

In the same neighborhood, Del Monte Foods recently closed its massive fruit canning plant, the last one in Ontario. Sisters whose family helped settle the region said the canning machinery was shipped to China. The Chinese offer cheap labor and cheap fruit.

The sisters said they never again will eat a Del Monte product.

The remaining orchards are being replaced with vineyards. The thousands of acres of white and red grapes are impressive to drive through. Even more impressive is Niagara Parkway, a linear park bordering the river in wine country. The entire stretch is landscaped with lush flowers, bushes and trees, and even private yards seem professionally tended.

The Niagara Parks Commission operates on fees that can be pretty steep. For instance, it costs $13 to $18 to park for three hours in public lots. We parked for $3 and walked, sometimes 5 or 6 miles a day, to see the sights. Flowers along the river grow to be enormous, likely because of the daily mist from Horseshoe Falls at dawn and dusk.

Niagara Falls is about five to six hours from Jackson by way of Windsor, where Canadian taxes increase gas prices to about $3.80 a gallon, the speed limit slows to 60 mph on freeways, and Tim Horton's coffee shops blanket the landscape.