It was raining so hard in Niagara that the helicopters couldn’t fly. This was October 17, 2006, and a fleet carrying more than 40 wine writers and sommeliers was scheduled to take off from Toronto, scooting south over Lake Ontario to Niagara’s Jordan Bench. After years of promises—including a planned $30-million building designed by Frank Gehry—we were finally going to get a glimpse, and a taste, of what was shaping up to be the most ambitious winery project in Canadian history.

Called Le Clos Jordanne, the enterprise was a joint venture between Vincor, the largest wine company in Canada, and Boisset Vins et Spiritueux, the largest producer in France’s vaunted Burgundy region. By combining French organic grape-growing know-how with the best New World science, it aimed to do what no winemaker in Ontario had yet been able to accomplish: make great pinot noir, one of the world’s most sought-after wines.

But the new venture was having a hard time living up to the hype. The helicopters grounded, our delegation was herded onto a hastily arranged pair of buses instead. And construction of Gehry’s great building hadn’t yet begun; when we arrived, we were ushered into an old industrial-sized garage that had been refitted to serve as a temporary winery. Banners bearing the fledgling company’s logo had been strung for our visit, and rows of wineglasses gleamed against white tablecloths. A makeshift, last-minute attempt, it was somehow typical of how Canadian wine has always been presented.

I have been a fan and student of pinot noir for 25 years, walking its vineyards and tasting it in cellars in Burgundy, Germany, California, Oregon, Australia and New Zealand. And I’d paid particular attention to this grape in Ontario since the 1980s, when Karl Kaiser and Donald Ziraldo, the founders of Inniskillin, made the first ser­ious attempts to grow it. A finicky, often cranky and impetuous grape, pinot noir can, with parental diligence, patience and love, be transformed into a wine of mesmerizing perfume and silky elegance. It was the grape at the centre of Sideways, the Oscar-nominated 2004 road movie set in California’s wine country. The film did surprising justice to the grape, largely through a tender soliloquy by actor Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles, that perfectly captured the sensuality of great pinot. “Its flavours, they’re just the most haunting, and brilliant, and thrilling, and subtle, and ancient on the planet,” he said. Of course I understood its allure, why people would want to grow it here on the same latitude as its spiritual homeland in Burgundy. But I was not convinced an Ontario pinot could ever be truly great. None had been to date.

As Le Clos Jordanne’s winemaker, Thom­as Bachelder, a tall, strapping Mont­realer with a boyish face and a mop of greying hair, stepped up to the podium to lead us through the tasting, I put my nose to the first glass, a 2004 Village Reserve, and his voice faded into the background. Up from the little pool of pale garnet floated a revela­tion, triggering a cascade of others. Piercing aromas of sour red fruits like cherry and cranberry. A touch of earthiness akin to the smell of freshly dug beets. A gentle sheen of vanilla from the oak barrels in which the wine had been aged. An accent of fresh cedar and woodsmoke. It was un-cate­gorically pure pinot, remarkably similar to Burgundy, and it was the least expensive of four more single-vineyard wines to come. By the time I sampled the winery’s best, its $60 Le Grand Clos, I was searching for words, wanting the proceedings to stop so that I could concentrate. The room was buzzing—Bachelder’s rich baritone couldn’t corral us. That wine was unlike any the province had ever produced. I knew at that moment that a page in On­tario’s wine history had just turned.