Visiting Niagara tasting rooms used to be a lifestyle dalliance. Today, there is a new, more urgent imperative: scavenging for fine, expensive and much sought-after labels that will never turn up at a liquor store near you. Many are pre-allocated to restaurants or wine clubs before release; some wineries have even begun rationing sales of their most popular bottles. Is this Napa, you ask, or Niagara? Call it the new Niagara, increasingly populated with high-calibre, multimillion-dollar, quality-focused wineries like Hidden Bench, which opens to visitors June 1 near Beamsville. There, deep-pocketed entrepreneur Harald Thiel has hired Montreal-raised, Australia-trained winemaker J. M. Bouchard to fashion a breathlessly good portfolio of rieslings, chardonnays, pinots noir and Bordeaux-inspired white and red blends. They’re gunning for greatness—Thiel and Bouchard even sold off their entire 2004 production (a decent vintage) because they thought it wasn’t good enough. But they had no such problems with 2005. That vintage’s very fine reserve and stunning tête de cuvée wines, to be released later this year and next, are from 30-year-plus vines on the Roso­mel Vineyard, one of three sites owned by Thiel. Indeed, with some of the oldest vines in Niagara, the wineries around Beamsville can make for fascinating visits, especially if you ask for a vineyard stroll. Walk among the rows of gnarled, black-trunked vines at Daniel Lenko, Thirty Bench, Tawse and Malivoire, and soak up the unique microclimate—“Be a grape,” as some viticulturists say—with the Niagara Escarpment’s limestone wall rising behind you and vistas of Lake Ontario to the north. In the tasting rooms, you’ll notice how those mature vines, as well as Niagara’s growing ranks of internationally honed winemakers, are delivering outstanding bottlings. You can still bring golf clubs, of course, or plan a day of pampering at the spa. But now more than ever, the best reason to visit wine country is for the wine itself.