Bala’s little red berries are turning into liquid gold.
Harvested cranberries usually have one of three destinations: juice, sauce or baked goods.
At Johnston’s Cranberry Marsh just north of Bala, a growing number of the tiny berries shaken from dwarf shrubs in the bogs of Ontario’s “cranberry capital” are finding their way into bottles of award-winning wines.
This year alone, about 100,000 pounds of the fruit were used to produce more than 50,000 bottles of wine. Most of it, at some point, goes through the hands of young winemaker Matt French.
Cutting no corners, French takes extra steps, using the best berries on the Johnston’s cranberry farm to create the local wines. No water is added. “Bouncing” high-quality berries are used rather than the soft, discoloured or misshapen leftovers. About three pounds of berries go into every bottle after being frozen, crushed, pressed, fermented and filtered.
Johnston’s Cranberry Marsh started in 1950 when Orville Johnston bought the land just north of Bala and began planting cranberries. Almost 60 years later, Orville’s son Murray, daughter-in-law Wendy and four grandsons continue to operate what is now the province’s oldest cranberry farm.
In 2001 Wendy and Murray, using vats in the basement of the original Johnston home, started the Muskoka Lakes Winery. That fall, they sold their first 600 cases (about 7,200 bottles) of cranberry wine in 16 days. In December of 2001, they sold 120 cases of cranberry blueberry-wine in four days.
The family’s winemaking business, they realized, could be a big one.
Two years ago French, a longtime family friend of the Johnstons, took the lead in wine-making operations for the marsh. French’s grandparents, who produce fruit in southern Ontario, have owned a cottage on nearby Medora Lake since 1951. French’s grandfather helped with the incorporation paperwork for Johnston’s Cranberries. The company’s founding board members were French’s grandfather, his grandmother and Orville Johnston.
When he turned 8, French started selling his grandparents’ apples in a stand on the cranberry farm during Bala’s annual cranberry festival – which draws thousands of visitors to the village and farm the weekend after Thanksgiving every year.
“I’ve never been into town for a cranberry festival, to see the booths and fair, I’ve always been here selling apples,” French said with a laugh.
French, who turned 29 last month, went on to earn a degree in biology and spent several years travelling before finding his way back to the Bala area.
“Fruit wines are something I always bought,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in local things, and fruit wine is often a very local experience.”
But too often, French said, he’d buy local fruit wines loaded with sugar and other additives, that didn’t taste the way he thought they could.
“They were always brutal, just terrible – sweet and disgusting,” he said. “I came here and it was a chance to be part of something local. And like a lot of things in the marsh – I’m tied here by family and history. It’s very much a local assemblage.”
For the past two years, French has combined his science background with his taste for good fruit wines to perfect the winemaking operations – helping the Johnstons win Canada-wide recognition for the unique taste and, recently, earning the cranberry wine a regular shelf spot in 204 of the province’s 600 LCBO stores and the cranberry-blueberry wine spots in 106 stores – two of only three fruit wines on the LCBO’s general list.
French, with the help of one part-time employee, Penny Moore, and a few extra hands during bottling, produces about 2,000 cases (12 bottles per case) of pure cranberry wine – a dry, slightly tart fruit wine.
He also produces 2,000 cases of a sweeter cranberry-blueberry wine. Other wines produced include a few hundred cases each year of semi-sweet white cranberry – made with ripe, but white, berries that haven’t picked up their fall colour; wild blueberry wine; a raspberry-cranberry desert wine and a cranberry desert wine with maple syrup.
All the ingredients in all the wines are from the marsh, or other local producers. Even the bottles’ labels are local – prints of scenes on the marsh painted by Gravenhurst artist David Dawson.
In the production area on the Johnston farm, French and Moore share stories – fruit explosions hitting the ceiling and the softer blueberries exploding through the press usually used to crush firm cranberries.
“We had a kid pressing blueberries and his grandmother came to pick him up in a Mercedes with white seats,” Moore recalls with a laugh. “I just shook my head.”
Together, using the production area behind the store on the marsh and the basement of the original Johnston home, the pair can produce the wines year round.
Unlike typical wine making with grapes, the cranberries can be frozen. In fact, French explained, they should be – breaking the structure of the fruit’s cells and conveniently allowing him to pull them out of the freezer for a batch throughout the off-season.
“Cranberries want to freeze out on the vine, and that’s how you get the best colours and reaction,” he said. “Since they’re frozen, I have the option of thawing them as I need them – four or five times a year – which means we can get away with a smaller operation than grape winemakers, who have to produce all their wine once a year.”
The cranberries, which don’t begin to ferment naturally like grapes, are put into 2,000 and 1,000-litre tanks where yeast encourages the fermentation.
“It you leave grapes lying around, they’ll start to turn into wine. If you leave cranberries lying around, they stay cranberries. We do everything a traditional wine maker’s way, same process, but very gradually.”
The whole process is an ongoing experiment for French and the Johnston family as they continuously work to perfect the wines.
“Grape wines go back thousands of years,” French said. “With cranberries, composition is different, acidity is different. There are a couple of producers, but there’s no convention, no handbook.
“We do ours like a fine grape wine, where you press the fruit, use the pure fruit juice. It’s a quality decision. We take prime, gorgeous berries – that makes a difference. You can make a mediocre wine if you throw everything in. I don’t have any fears of a judge tasting them. This isn’t a cash grab, it’s good.”
Judges have approved. For the past two years, the cranberry-blueberry wine has garnered double gold – a best of category award – among fruit wines in the All Canadian Wine Championships.
“That means they’ve got the highest scoring wine out of their category – that’s a really big deal,” said Bev Carnahan, director of the All Canadian Wine Championships, who explained that judges taste every wine in a category, critique it, and scores are entered into a computer which combines totals to calculate a winner.
The Muskoka Lakes Winery’s cranberry wine earned a gold in its category in the same competition this year and the white cranberry earned silver.
Beyond awards, there is increasing demand for the wines and French, with his rigorous analytical approach, has brought quality to the Muskoka Lakes Winery, Murray Johnston said.
“Cranberry wine making is new, and Matt’s writing the book and actually improving our quality,” he said. “Winemaking is our business now. I spent 25 years as a cranberry farmer and switched careers without changing places.”
On top of access to store shelves and promising industry recognition, the wine continues to get strong reviews from customers – many of them local people happy to find local products.
“There’s a local phenomenon – a northern culture with our wine,” Johnston says. “I get stories from people who remember picking cranberries with their grandfather. It’s a natural for them – something people in this community can find in the wilderness. It comes from here.”
In the Johnston’s store, overlooking the bogs of red-leaved cranberry plants at the end of a rural road just north of Bala, a couple visiting from Toronto, celebrating their 54th wedding anniversary, stood at a counter sampling the wines and gave them a review of their own.
“I really like this one, with the maple syrup,” said Yvonne Bishop as her husband nodded while sipping his own sample.
“It was worth the trip already,” she whispered, with a smile.
Mellowing in Bala
Winemaker Matt French waits for feedback as Toronto visitor, Yvonne Bishop, tastes a sample at the cranberry marsh’s onsite store.
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