"Orillia’s Wine Experience started out in the summer of ’98 as a franchise under the name Wine Not and was located in the Fittons West Centre. In 2006 the Franchise Wine Not was sold and I decided to go out on my own and that is when Orillia’s Wine Experience was born. For those of you that don’t know what we do, here it is in a nutshell!
We are a licensed establishment for people to come and make their own wine, the legal requirement of the customer is to sprinkle the yeast and come back and bottle it, we do all the rest, clarifying, stabilizing, degassing and finally filtering. I should also mention that we can also customize an individuals wine, for example, by leaving out the oak of a Chardonnay making it ’Naked’ as some wineries refer to as or adding more oak to a wine. Other items that we have used over the years include, peppercorns, banana chips, elderberries, strawberries to name a few.
As the owner of Orillia’s Wine Experience, I have entered wines into the Wine Maker Magazine amateur wine competition and have won many awards over the past 24 years because of my passion for making a quality wine that I can be proud of. Most of the wines we sell are drank within 3-6 months but they can last a lot longer, I have had our 4 week wine kits at 5 years old still tasting great. We don’t recommend aging the wines that long, but some of our high end stuff at $224.00 per batch is best if aged for a year. All of our wines are priced with the corks, shrinks, labels and all the taxes in, bottles are extra, prices start at $149.00.
If you are considering making your own wine, but are still a little unsure just ask Tom Ormsby or Bill Baker, long time wine making customers and pretty good curlers, could there be some correlation?
Since joining the Orillia Curling Club in 2019 I have met a lot of interesting people and developed some friendships. It's unfortunate that I didn’t join sooner as here it is 2022 and I have just one full year of experience due to covid and ice equipment failure. When I was younger I use to think curling was a boring sport, but once you play it, like golf, you realize its not boring at all, the game is a challenge, its a chess match combined with a precision skill of rock throwing and sweeping.
The other cool thing is that the Club makes it easy to join and offers on ice classes to explain the rules, etiquette and the basic approach to throwing the rocks as well as some sweeping lessons. I have truly enjoyed my time since joining and look forward to many more years to come."
Cheers
And Happy New Year!
Don Corrick
