There’s a little village not far from our winery, just outside of Tweed, called Ivanhoe, Ontario. If you’re heading down to Belleville on Highway 62, you can’t miss it. Ivanhoe is famous for its cheese factory: The Ivanhoe Cheese Factory.

1:07 – 1:30

I actually had some many years ago when I was living in Japan, in Roppongi at the international food store. I was a little shocked to see cheese from home – from Ivanhoe, which I was kind of amazed that it was far across the world. The Ivanhoe Cheese Factory was founded by a guy who was buried just before he hit the factory on the right-hand side.

1:30 – 1:41

It’s the only farm in town with a silo in front of it. That farm is owned by an Amish family. And you’ll see a little grave site right next to the road.

1:41 – 1:50

It’s got a little white fence around it. The guy who’s buried there, his name is Henry Gauen. And Henry Gauen, of course, was the original founder of the cheese factory.

1:50 – 2:11

But Henry Gauen was somebody else too. Henry was the ship’s carpenter on the HMS Investigator on the McClure Arctic Expedition in 1850. Now, the McClure Arctic Expedition went to the Arctic for two reasons:

2:11 – 2:35

Number one was to find the lost Franklin Expedition. The terror in the Erebus ships got lost in the ice five years earlier in 1845. And the second reason for going there was that Queen Victoria actually put a 10,000-pound reward for anybody who could find the fabled Northwest Passage.

2:35 – 2:49

What that was was a shortcut to the Asian markets. What was happening at the time, there was no Panama Canal. So ships that wanted to trade with China or India; they’d have to take the long way.

2:49 – 3:12

So they’d have to literally sail from the U.K. across the Atlantic, down past North America, past Florida, past Central America, all the way past South America until you got to the bottom near Chile. And you’d cross through the Strait of Magellan, past Cape Horn, and then up the Pacific side, and then you’d have to sail all the way up to Hawaii and then keep heading west until you hit China. That’s a long way to go.

3:12 – 3:41

So they thought, you know, there’s got to be a faster way. Maybe if we cut across Canada’s Arctic it will be faster. So what was happening was that all these ships from the U.K. and Europe were heading west past Greenland and over Labrador and over Hudson’s Bay into the Arctic, and everybody, including the Franklin Expedition, were heading that way. Everybody was going in and nobody was coming out. So Captain McClure, they asked him if he wanted to go and see if he could find the boys and find the passage.

3:42 – 3:49

So what he did is he thought: “You know, I’m not going to do like everybody else. Maybe our boys are further west than we’ve been looking. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take the long way and attempt this mission from the other side – from Alaska to Labrador heading East. Everyone’s heading west. But I’m going to try heading east.”

3:50 – 4:07

So what he did is he loaded up his ship and then he sailed past South America – the long way and then up past the Pacific side. He was going to enter through Alaska at the Bering Strait and head east. Henry Gaughan was selected in 1849 to be the ship’s carpenter.

4:07 – 4:27

And what Henry did, showing how naive the man was; the first thing he did when he found out he was going on that ship was he bought himself a pair of ice skates, naively thinking that when he got up there he would ice skate across the North Pole. And I actually have his ice skates here on display at my winery. They’re very old and very precious.

4:28 – 4:38

Anyway, the men were up there and they got up to the Bering Strait around August. So you have to understand that things are starting to freeze up, up there. And you’ve got to see things from their perspective.

4:38 – 4:49

What they were looking at was sea ice as far as you can see on the left and the continent on the right. They actually stayed close to shore. That’s where the meltwater was.

4:49 – 4:58

And they kept getting stuck in sandbars as they were heading east. They went by the McClintock boat site. If you guys never heard of that? What they did is they rounded a corner.

4:59 – 5:08

And they found this rowboat sitting there on the shore in the middle of nowhere. This European rowboat. And there were two guys sitting in it.

5:09 – 5:18

One guy actually was sitting in the back holding onto two loaded shotguns. And there was about 40 pounds of chocolate in front of him. And there was another guy in the fetal position, laying in the front.

5:18 – 5:25

And when they hailed these guys, of course, they didn’t respond. So they went over to them and they were frozen solid. They were mummies.

5:25 – 5:40

And when they actually touched the guy in the back, his head fell off into the boat, which was pretty creepy. But they had all these baubles and stuff around the boat, all this junk. And they realized that the men were trying to trade their stuff to the Inuit for food but they never met any.

5:42 – 5:48

And they just died where they sat. And the reason why the guy in the back was holding onto the shotguns, was for polar bears. They were afraid of being attacked.

5:48 – 5:57

And they just unfortunately passed away and froze to death where they sat. So they gave them a Christian burial. And then the men kept heading east.

5:58 – 6:14

So they’re heading east and they’re heading east and they’re heading east. And unfortunately, the McClure expedition on that HMS Investigator ship, got stuck in the ice. And they got stuck in the ice up in the Arctic, not far from Labrador, where there’s a place called Mercy Bay.

6:14 – 6:29

And so McClure entered Mercy Bay and he got stuck there. And this is an actual lithograph of their situation that was illustrated by the survivors that actually made it out of there. They were stuck in this spot for three years.

6:30 – 6:39

Three years. They ran out of food. Actually, in their last weeks, according to their diaries, apparently the men ate mice to survive.

6:40 – 6:58

There’s one quote that said that the men actually, quote, boiled their boots to make soup. That’s how desperate they were for nutrition. The warmest they could actually get that boat, because you have to understand they also ran out of fuel, the warmest they could get that ship inside was actually minus 12 Celsius.

6:58 – 7:07

That’s the warmest you could get. And the men were dying of scurvy and malnutrition. Most of them lost their fingers and their toes to frostbite.

7:08 – 7:15

Just awful, awful conditions being stuck there. And so they had to get out of there. They had to get the hell out.

7:15 – 7:30

So what they did is they had Henry, Henry Gauen, the guy who was buried in Ivanhoe, being the ship’s carpenter, they had him make skis and put them at the bottom of their rowboats. And the men were going to tow them across the ice and try to find open sea so they could get out of there. They actually had barrels of black powder.

7:31 – 7:43

They were going to even blast their way, if they could, to the open sea. So for three years, the men were trying to find a way out. Now, Mercy Bay showed them absolutely no mercy.

7:43 – 8:12

You really get a look at the mindset of these men as they’re trying to escape, naming places they saw like Starvation Cove, Terror Harbor and Desperation Bay. Getting back to Henry Gauen’s ice skates, when the ship started cracking at that spot, the men lugged a grand piano across the ice sheet to shore to try to save it. I mean, that’s how out of touch these guys were with the horrors of their situation.

8:12 – 8:26

So they’re lugging these rowboats, trying to find open sea. And in the back, of course, like I said, they had food. But they also had barrels of port with them that they purchased at a shop at 181 Piccadilly in London.

8:27 – 8:31

That shop is called Fortnum & Mason. It’s still there. It’s actually one of the oldest shops in the world.

8:31 – 8:39

Port from this shop was on the ship’s manifest. So they had these barrels of port, and they’re lugging them across the ice. Now, port, let me tell you a bit about port.

8:40 – 8:46

To make wine is quite simple. You just ferment your wine until, you know, 11%, 12%, 13%. To make port is even simpler.

8:47 – 8:52

You only ferment the wine to about 5% or 6%. Now, that’s still very sweet. It’s still juice.

8:52 – 9:02

So it’s nice and sweet. And then what you do is you dump in 80 proof brandy. That kills your fermentation, and that brings that alcohol content up to 20%, and that’s called port.

9:03 – 9:08

Well, you can’t call it port. That’s illegal. The name port is owned by the Portuguese.

9:08 – 9:19

If it’s not from Portugal, it’s not port. You can call it a port-like wine, but, you know, that sounds really unsexy if you want to go market it. So I had to come up with a name for this.

9:20 – 9:33

I have to make up a name. You can call it your grandma’s name or your dog’s name or whatever you want, but you’re not calling it port unless it’s from Portugal, very much like the French with champagne. You can make a sparkling wine, but you’re not calling it champagne unless it’s from the region of Champagne, and that’s actually international law.

9:35 – 9:50

So they’re lugging these barrels of port across the ice, and something happened to those barrels of port that does not happen in Portugal. It can never happen in Portugal. The port froze, okay? Now, port doesn’t freeze.

9:51 – 10:32

It’s sweet, and it’s high in alcohol, but it will freeze if it gets down to about minus 20 Celsius, and at minus 20, something magical happens to it. Anything that makes wine bitter, citric acid, tartaric acid, malic acid, what happens at minus 20 is that those acids will crystallize, and they get heavy, and they’ll go down to the bottom of the barrel so that when the sailors tried it, according to their diaries, they found that this new port, after it was frozen, was, quote, far smoother than any other port they’ve ever had, end quote, which I thought was very interesting. Now, it didn’t end there.

10:32 – 11:00

You’ve got to remember that they’re lugging these barrels of port on these rowboats across the ice in the summertime as well, okay? And you’ve got to know what’s going on in the Arctic in the summertime. They call the Arctic the land of the midnight sun. The sun does not set in the Canadian Arctic in the summertime, and what was happening was that the sun was beating down on those barrels of port in the back of those rowboats, and what it did was cook it in the barrels, okay? Now, this is a process called madeirizing.

11:00 – 11:04

Madeirization or, like, the Portuguese actually call it madeira. You can’t call it that. They own that name too.

11:05 – 11:13

But the process is called madeirizing. When you madeirize a port, essentially what you do is you oxidize it. So it turns brown, and it actually becomes kind of indestructible.

11:13 – 11:46

It’s already been killed, so it can sit on the counter for 20 years, and you can still drink it. But more than that, when the sun warms it up in those sherry barrels, it also pulls these lovely toffee and caramel flavors out of the wood. And then when the sailors tried that after it froze, and then after the sun cooked it, they said in their diaries, quote, “We found this new beverage fit for Queen Victoria, giving a moment of joy to the lips of our suffering crew.” End quote.

11:47 – 12:06

What do you think? Absolutely beautiful. Now, I’m reading these documents with the eye of a vintner, the eye of a winemaker, and I was just struck, like, I’ve got to make this. I’ve got to make it.

12:07 – 12:19

So what we did is we made a port last year, and we froze it outside the dead of January. Here it got down to minus 27 Celsius. And I had this much acid fall out of that wine.

12:19 – 12:29

I was shocked. I had never seen that much acid fall out of a wine before. Then I racked it off the acid, and then we put it in sherry barrels, and we cooked them all last summer.

12:31 – 12:38

Now, I’ve never had anything as amazing in my life. We actually had three major wine critics out here. They said it was the best port they’ve ever had, portàge they’ve ever had.

12:38 – 12:45

So, I mean, that’s what I’m calling it. Actually, I have to give it a name. So I’m calling it Portàge, which I think is a very fitting name.

12:45 – 12:57

It’s a very Canadian name. This is what the voyagers came up with that name when they were traversing Canada and discovering this new continent. And I thought Portàge was very fitting because that’s exactly what these sailors were doing across the ice.

12:57 – 13:10

They were portaging these barrels across the ice, and this is what happened. So this brings us to the end of our story. And if you look at my bottle, you’ll see the label kind of reads like an old newspaper, and I’ve got different panels, one with Henry Gauen and his ice skates.

13:10 – 13:21

And one of the last panels you’ll see is the Great Seal of the President of the United States. Well, what’s that doing as part of this story? Well, this is the best ending ever! Here’s what happens…

13:21 – 13:40

So the sailors, of course, were trying to escape their predicament across the ice, lugging those barrels of port to try to keep warm, and they finally found open sea. And when they got to the shore, Captain McClure took out a sextant, and he looked at the horizon and up at the stars, and he said, hey, we’ve been here before. We’ve been here from the east.

13:40 – 13:53

“We just found the Northwest Passage!” God, if we can only escape our situation and get back to London, we’ll get that reward that Queen Victoria put out. So what he had the men do, he had them build a stone tower.

13:54 – 14:14

Like a cairn. This is how ships would signal each other in the past in new territory. And inside this cairn, he put a note in a tin, and the note said, you know, we’re the McClure Expedition, and we’re stuck here in the ice at these coordinates in Mercy Bay, and we’re starving to death, and we’re dying, and we’re running out of fuel and food, so SOS, please save us.

14:14 – 14:30

And he put that inside the cairn, and the men went back to the ship. Well, a few months later, this ship goes sailing by, and that ship is called the HMS Resolute. It’s a brand-new British tall ship, and they spot the cairn, and they crack it open, and they read the note, and they go, hey, that’s McClure.

14:30 – 14:34

We’re looking for these guys. They’ve been gone now for three years. We need to save them.

14:34 – 15:10

So what they do is they go save McClure in Mercy Bay, and they rescued Henry Gauen and the rest of the crew, and they brought them all back to the Resolute, and the Resolute took them back towards London. Well, on the way back to London, unfortunately, the Resolute gets stuck in the ice, and, I mean, these guys just can’t get a break, but thank God there was a third ship nearby called the HMS North Star. So what they had to do is they had to abandon the Resolute to the ice for the North Star, and the North Star took the McClure expedition and the Resolute crew, and they got them back to the UK, to London.

15:11 – 15:54

So when Henry Gauen, the founder of the Ivanhoe Cheese Factory, got back to London, he was one of the few men in human history that entered the Arctic and the West and exited out the East, which meant he got Queen Victoria’s reward money, and with that money, he used it to emigrate to Ivanhoe, Ontario, and he used that money to start the Ivanhoe Cheese Factory. Now, why the symbol of the President of the United States? Well, that rescue ship, the Resolute ship that’s stuck in the ice, well, a couple of years later, it melts, and an American whaler was whaling up there and they spot the Resolute, and so they wave at this big British tall ship and nobody waves back, so the sailors got on board, and that ship was completely abandoned. So, hey, this is ours.

15:55 – 16:07

You know, sailors scavenge rights. So what they did is they put a tow rope on the Resolute and they towed the Resolute back to Boston Harbor. Well, the American government got wind of that and they’re like, wait a second, you can’t keep that.

16:07 – 16:32

This ship belongs to the British, so we have to give it back to our allies, the British. So that’s what they did. As a gesture of goodwill, the Americans gave the Resolute back to the British and the British said thank you, and as a gesture of goodwill back to the Americans, what the British did is they cut down the main mast of the Resolute ship, and with that mast, they made it into lumber, and with that lumber, they built a desk, and that desk is called the Resolute Desk.

16:32 – 17:25

It sits in the Oval Office of the President of the United States of this state, and the lumber that made that desk, which is also, they still have some of that lumber in the Library of Congress that’s controlled by the U.S. Army, just in case that desk gets damaged. The lumber from that ship that built the Resolute Desk is from the same ship that rescued that poor man, Henry Gauen, who’s buried around the corner of our winery in little Ivanhoe, Ontario. So this is a beverage that no one has tasted in 170 years, created during those extreme conditions on that expedition in Canada’s high Arctic, and not only is it a wine of place, a local story, but it’s also national history and international history.

17:25 – 17:36

It hits all the marks. To me, this is the greatest wine and cheese story ever told.

Sandor Johnson meets Barack Obama in the White House.