IT’S A SKY-BLUE SUNDAY, hot and humid. Dry soil crunches underfoot as I walk between the rows of a vineyard and bend to inspect knee-high vines. It’s early June, but grapes are already forming, acid-green pinpricks waiting to fill with sugar. Wind stirs the rushes in a nearby manmade pond, designed to catch snow melt in the spring.

Beside me, Geoff Webb is tangled in trellis wires, his gestures as much a part of his language as words. Dressed in Crocs, khakis and a breezy linen shirt, he peppers his speech with the word “man” as he explains why the limestone-rich soil in Prince Edward County, Ont., is perfect for his buttery vanilla Chardonnay. A chilled drink on the shaded deck of Black Prince Winery’s tasting room sounds pretty good right now, but Webb wants to show off his production facilities first.

Black Prince, established in 2001, operates out of a set of interconnected barns on the site of a former horse farm. Inside, the sweet smell of hay mixes with the yeasty musk of fermenting grapes. There are giant steel vats of various vintages and, in one corner, a jumble of plastic barrels full of flawed batches. “I just can’t bear to throw anything away,” says Webb, who, four litres at a time, pours this wine into moonshine jugs and takes it home.

Eventually, we make our way to the tasting room, where visitors are steady. Black Prince is the first winery on the way westward out of the town of Picton, Ont., and this morning there was a line-up when the doors opened at 11. Near a suit of armour that guards the entrance, an employee pours samples for a retired couple (three for $5, or free — sometimes — if you buy three bottles). They buy a case.

As Webb talks tones, local cooper Pete Bradford arrives to discuss this season’s orders. His hand-built oak casks, made from Prince Edward County wood, are aging 200 cases of Webb’s wine, something that makes both men giddy. Neither can wait to see what local wood and wine will do together.

This type of collaboration epitomizes Prince Edward County. Cafes carry local wines, vintners sell local cheeses and restaurants, such as Picton’s Harvest, focus on local, seasonal ingredients. Wineries even offer cooperative programs to assist smaller growers. Of the 17 full-service wineries in Prince Edward County today, seven received support from Black Prince when they were getting started. In 2007, their efforts earned all 17 wineries the Vintners Quality Alliance designation that’s on the bottle of Chardonnay I take home.

For more information, go to www.blackprincewinery.com.

— Amy Kenny

IF YOU GO
Prince Edward County, a headland that juts into Lake Ontario west of Kingston, is chock-a-block with wineries, art studios and galleries, and much more that’s worth checking out this fall: • Admire the glorious reds, oranges and yellows of autumn from the deck of a chartered sailboat. Pack a windbreaker and Prince Edward Sailing Charters will supply a thermos full of hot coffee. www.pec.on.ca/sail

• Experience an old-fashioned fair, complete with judged horse, cat and dog shows, a softball tournament and a historical re-enactment at the Ameliasburgh Country Fair on October 3 and 4. ameliasburghfair.googlepages.com

• Witness a parade in which the main attractions are bloated, nearly-200-kilogram behemoths from the squash family, and then follow it up with a weigh-off, contests, games and food at the 13th annual Prince Edward County Pumpkinfest on October 17. www.pec.on.ca/pumpkinfest

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FEATURING PULSING drums and whirling dancers in colourful, traditional clothing, the powwow is perhaps the most visible symbol of the resurgence of First Nations culture and identity. The beating heart of the Manito Ahbee Festival, a fiveday celebration of indigenous arts and music held every fall in downtown Winnipeg, is a weekend-long powwow. This year more than 800 dancers will compete for $150,000 in prize money in categories such as traditional, jingle and fancy shawl dancing. “We’re big on the international powwow circuit,” says Gloria Spence, the festival’s general manager.

Manito Ahbee celebrates First Nations “heritage, talents and accomplishments,” says Spence, “and it’s not just about celebrating on our own. We also want to share these things with non-aboriginal people.” Now in its fourth year, the event hopes to draw more than 15,000 visitors from across Canada and the United States, fulfilling its mandate to be “a festival for all nations.”

The schedule kicks off with busloads of students and educators participating in workshops that mix traditional teachings with digital-age skills such as video-making. The Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards present a gala Friday night show at Winnipeg’s MTS Centre, with new categories that cover indigenous musical expressions from hand drumming and peyote prayer chants right through to blues, rock and hip hop. Gala attendees can also explore an 80-booth marketplace and trade show.

The festival takes its name from the centuries-old gatherings of First Nations at Manito Ahbee (“where the creator sits”), a sacred site in the southeast corner of Manitoba. The 2009 gathering is rooted in the past, but it also looks forward, affirming the range and relevance of contemporary First Nations, Inuit and Métis culture. Spence sees the festival as a hopeful counterpoint to common media images of indigenous people, which often centre on tough social problems. “These are the positive stories,” says Spence. “We want to get the word out that we have a lot to offer, a lot to share.”

This year’s festival runs from November 4 to 8. For more information, go to www.manitoahbee.com.

— Alison Gillmor

THERE’S AN ALMOST mystical stillness to the rolling grassland and coulees of St. Victor Petroglyphs Provincial Park, about 150 kilometres south of Moose Jaw, Sask. A gravel walkway leads to a chain-link fence, and on the other side, carved into the horizontal caprock at the top of a sandstone cliff, sit roughly 300 carvings of turtles, grizzly paw prints, deer tracks and human hands and feet — the biggest collection of petroglyphs in southern Saskatchewan and one of only a handful of horizontal petroglyph sites of this scale in Canada.

Many northern plains people used this land over the past 1,500 years, according to Saskatchewan archaeologist Tim Jones. He isn’t sure who carved the petroglyphs, or when they were made, but believes they might have been created by several groups, including ancestors of the modern-day Dakota and Nakota. In the early 1990s, a local First Nations elder expressed interest in letting the land reclaim the site. The subject remains sensitive, but in recent years the archaeological and aboriginal communities, along with the provincial government, worked together to develop better interpretative signage and a fenced-off lookout area.

Because they’re carved into the ground, not on the cliff face, it’s difficult to see the petroglyphs on cloudy days or when the sun is directly overhead. But in the morning light, these messages locked in stone reveal themselves, and one can see into the past. For more information, go to www.tpcs .gov.sk.ca/stvictor.

— Jessica Eissfeldt