This article is part of a series called Backstory where I reveal how feature and in-depth stories were crafted. You can find more with the Backstory tag by searching “Backstory” in the search bar.
The original story was published here:
During fall break, I went down to Toronto to research my master’s research project. While I was there, I hopped down to Hamilton for dinner with someone in the wine industry. We met through CouchSurfing when he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) hosted me for several days on my first trip to Toronto in 2016. He’s since moved to Hamilton.
We kept in touch. I looked him up on my giant North American road trip in 2018 and again when I returned to Ontario in 2020. I hadn’t visited him yet since he moved in 2021, so I decided to pay him a visit to catch up. Knowing that I’d need to have a story idea by the time I got back to Ottawa, I took a shot in the dark and asked if anything interesting was going on in the wine industry.
He told me that the wine harvest began in September and was looking bleak this year. The early harvest was drowned by copious amounts of rainfall in August causing some grapes to have diluted sugar content and others to break and become infected. Several Niagara vineyards could only use as little as half their grapes. I returned from my trip and told Morgane, my writing partner the idea. We pushed it up to the editor who agreed it was newsworthy as long as we covered vineyards near Ottawa.
Prince Edward County is a new wine-growing region and still in the 613 area code, so it was close enough to be relevant. My contact provided me with a list of names to get in touch with in the county. Nearly all the winemakers that I contacted were happy to speak with me. But there was just one problem.
The wine harvest wasn’t terrible overall. October dried up balancing out the damage caused by heavy rainfall and harvests in late October were so plentiful that there weren’t enough workers to harvest all the fruit. Hundreds of people stayed outside for up to 18 hours a day just to filter through all the grapes. It was just a matter of choosing what to use and what to leave behind.
It was just as newsworthy with happy news. Morgane and I quickly pivoted the direction of our story without notifying our editor of the 180-degree change in trajectory. While she worked on getting government sources and institutions to speak on the record, which can sometimes be tedious, I went down to Prince Edward County for wine tours.
I visited four vineyards and went on in-depth tours of the facilities of two of them. I sat down with winemakers over pizza and a glass of Pinot Noir to understand their motivations and struggles, I laughed with them as we ate grapes right off the vine, and I got lost through a mental tour in Europe while reminiscing wines of the Loire and the Rhine.
There really weren’t any multimedia elements to accompany the story, so I took a quick video to fulfill the requirement and made a small map pointing out the vineyards and regional organizations we interviewed. I like wine, and I learned so much more during that trip. Morgane was never a big wine nerd, but the process intrigued her.
It took a whole day driving all over the western end of Prince Edward County and cycling around 150 acres of vineyards with two cameras to get those brilliant shots, but it was well worth it in the end. It’s probably one of my favorite stories of the semester.
