At some point in my life I found myself and my family holding the deed for a 46 acres beautiful prime vineyard site, though featureless but screaming of somewhereness...
Wine was already both a passion and a companion to me until then. But never thought, one day, nature would be an ally and a fierce adversary and a teacher to me. How could I? I worked in finance and consulting most of my life, where following sets of rules were the norm to achieve a purpose. I was in the business of telling what needs to be done in their journey towards perfection. Something I thought would come handy, how wrong one could get.
I was lucky to find myself next to the world’s premier upcoming wine region, Niagara-on-the-Lake when I moved to Canada. I could not stop spending all of my spare time there. At some point, nature took over the control of my life journey and taught me slowly and gradually that I have to listen and learn from nature itself what to do, how to do, and mainly to accept the wonders it delivers and start from there.
As of now, with the recent years working as a farmer on the vineyard and winemaker at the winery, the vineyard has shown us how to partner with its products to turn them into wine. All while showing me that it will be nature that will manage me on the journey to perfection in producing beautiful wines. And only hoping my children, who were small kids then and young adults now, would keep the same passion in their hearts and hold on to the joy that they had on the first day we were together on the land running around dreaming of things we would be doing.
We are learning from setbacks, wrong decision, mistakes created by impatience, unforced errors, and believe me there are a lot of them. Accepting them being part of the journey was not something that come intuitively but we are learning and this is helping us to craft better and better wines by the year. In 2017, when smelled our first wine, full of aromas and bouquet of spices, and more the taste of Niagara-on-the-Lake, we thought it worth all the troubles and it will continue to worth all the challenges laying ahead. We wanted to preserve Niagara in our wines, and carry this to your home in a bottle.
Please let me know what you think about our wine. The most important of all is, how it makes you feel tasting our wine and sharing Niagara experience…
Faik Turkmen
info@stonebridgevineyards.com