Story by: Signe Langford
Photography: Christopher Gentile

Reprinted from Watershed

Breaking the rules and surprising the critics, Potter Settlement Artisan Winery produces internationally multi-award-winning wines in tiny Tweed, Ontario.

Ask any oenophile about the best terroirs for growing great grapes, and the Canadian Shield is not on the tip of their tongue. Let’s be honest: it doesn’t even flicker across the imagination, but actor and winemaker Sandor Johnson is changing that, one medal at a time.

Situated on the 44th parallel, Potter Settlement is awfully far north for a vineyard – the winters are harsh and the summers are not terribly long (though they are getting warmer, due to climate change). So what is it about this place that gives Johnson’s wines their winning edge and unique flavour profiles? Minerals – hundreds of them – deposited on this spot by receding glaciers thousands of years ago. Whereas the soils of Ontario’s most famous wine region, Niagara, contain 15 recorded minerals, the land under vine here is rich, with 242: everything from iron to granite to semi-precious stones – garnet and amethyst – all adding their je ne sais quoi to the wines. There’s even gold in them thar hills, though not enough to dig for; here, there’s more gold hanging on the bottles than in the ground. In fact, the amount of bling dangling from the display bottles behind the tasting bar verges on scandalous.

However, in the wine world, there’s no such thing as too many medals. Especially when a little winery from Tweed, Ontario is wowing judges in France, California and London. Of course, it’s not just good soil that makes these wines so special; it takes countless hours of hard work, good science, the location’s uniquely forgiving micro-climate, some biodynamic hocus-pocus, and Johnson’s unorthodox, creative – even cloak and dagger – approach to the craft. This is an “artisan” winery in the truest sense. Johnson isn’t just making wonderful wines, he’s storytelling, inventing and reinventing, breaking new ground, asking “what if?” and performing archeological miracles. One of his wines is fermented with a yeast drawn out and grown from a fragment of barrel stave he managed to sweet talk from a cooper in France; another was made with yeast grown in a buried cow’s horn stuffed with herbs, à la fifth-century monks. And for a soon-to-be released wine Johnson is calling Ancient Ferment, he’s employing a 6,000-year-old yeast resurrected from an ancient Cyprian wine amphora.

“I’ve been accused of corporate espionage,” says Johnson. “Which I don’t like and don’t accept.”

The man is less a spy and more of an investigator, maybe even a bit of a mad scientist. He challenges the limitations and traditions of the process, the grape, the terroir, where others haven’t, and he’s pushing the envelope of what can be done with wine – white, red, and fortified – here in Canada, and indeed, the world. It’s not just yeasts and grape varieties, such as the Marquette grape, Johnson experiments with; his curiosity extends to rare and extinct timbers for constructing the finest barrels for aging and imparting unique flavours; and he’s not shy about investing in his flights of fancy. He paid €7,000 for a single barrel to make just 336 bottles of his Triple Rare Ferment Chardonnay; he’s dredged Lake Superior for antique chestnut timbers; and he’s repurposed antique butternut wood felled by his grandfather. On the rocky yet lush vineyard, the heavy lifting starts in early March, when a team of workers snip their way up and down all 13 acres, over six weeks, pruning the vines back – hard – encouraging healthy growth. Mother Nature takes over providing sun, heat and rain, while deep taproots draw up the mineral-rich water from an underground river that flows southeast from Georgian Bay.

Potter Settlement – named after the road it’s on – is a very small winery, producing only 1,000 cases, or 12,000 bottles, per year. But with wine, small is mighty. Here there is no machinery, only caring human hands, tending the vines, pruning and cropping, and selectively picking only the best, ripest grapes come harvest time.

It’s these hands-on, small-batch, organic methods that set Potter Settlement apart from the big, commercial wine makers. But Johnson didn’t set out to create a unique northern winery; the place has been in his family since the 1830s, and after three decades acting and modelling in the US, it was time to come home – at least for the summers – to see how far he could take this rugged terrain on its journey from farmland to vineyard.

He’s lived in New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, California, and Manhattan, and everywhere he’s gone, he’s brought home ideas and knowledge that he applies at Potter Settlement. He still spends the winters in California, where he works at some of the top Napa Valley wineries, often as a volunteer. “I’m not there to make money,” says Johnson. “I’m there to learn.”

And now, two decades after those first vines went into the ground, and only six years after the release of his first vintage, the awards for these unconventionally produced wines continue to pour in. “We’ve entered our wines into 28 competitions,” says Johnson, “and come home with 28 wins from some of the most prestigious competitions in the world – France, London, San Francisco.” Johnson has put his wines on some high-profile tables: Barack Obama’s and Justin Trudeau’s for example. Now perhaps he’ll put Tweed on the winemaking map, too.