TAWSE WINERY
WHO: Daniel Lafleur, national sales manager
WHERE: Lincoln
EMPLOYEES: 12 permanent
FIRST RELEASED CIDER: 2016 tawsewinery.ca
THE HARSH WINTERS of 2014 and 2015 did a number on Tawse Winery’s grape crops.
“We lost about 40 per cent of our crop in the past two years,” says Daniel Lafleur, manager of national sales.
Naturally, fewer grapes meant less wine, prompting Tawse winemaker Paul Pender to develop a new product made from something he could more readily get his hands on.
That something was apples, and that product was hard cider.
The timing was good given craft cider’s increasing popularity in the alcohol market, Lafleur says. “It’s very trendy right now,” he notes. The winery already had channels of distribution in place for its wines, so it wasn’t too difficult to add another product to the list, Lafleur adds.
Their first offering — a friendly, somewhat dry and somewhat sweet blend called Tawse Cider — was released in January. It’s said to have qualities similar to Tawse wine — pure-tasting, fresh and bright.
A second cider, dubbed Tawse Bottle-Fermented, is expected to be released in July.
Between the two varieties, offered in kegs and 700-mL bottles, Pender has made 5,000 litres of cider, which is about 0.2 per cent of the winery’s total output.
Wine remains the main bread and butter for Tawse, while cider is more of an experiment to see how it sells.
So far, so good, Lafleur says, noting that over the past couple of months, cider sales have been increasing.
Tawse Cider is available in about 30 restaurants across the province, from Ottawa to London.
They are also looking at producing a cherry version that would be released come fall, Lafleur says.
“If it’s successful, we will ramp up our (cider) production moving forward. If it’s not selling well, maybe eventually it will disappear.”
DID YOU KNOW:
Despite being an established winery, Tawse is faced with battles similar to the smaller cideries when selling their product at the LCBO. Because their production of cider is limited, it doesn’t make financial sense for them to try to get it into stores because the profit margin would not be there, Lafleur says. The winery would lose money selling it in a retail store, taking home less than half of what a keg would fetch when sold to a restaurant.