SWITZERLAND JOHN SWITZER
Wine, history, cheese – and nice, smooth roads
I love the quiet of the open road in the
early morning. The air smells sweeter, the hum of tires is soothing, and the curiosity of what you are about to discover is all the more invigorating early in the morning. Today’s tour started in Kemptville.
We had a vague notion of finding some ruins somewhere north of Cornwall that a reader had suggested would make for great meandering. So off we went armed with a fresh Timmy’s, heading east on Route 43 to Winchester. Winchester is a great town, but it’s not
that big. Still, we were able to get lost and ended up somewhere on Route 3. We were heading east when we saw a winery sign just north of Chesterville. We found Domaine du Cervin, a
picturesque farm nestled in a field of grape vines and surrounded by fields of (New Zealand) red deer. (Wait til ya see the fencing to contain these critters!) We met a wonderful family whose
father had seen grapes growing beside a cornfield back in 1995 and thought he could grow grapes, too. They sold the dairy business in 2002 to concentrate solely on the deer and wine business. It was a little early in the day for us to
do any real wine tasting, but we loved the people, so we bought a couple of bottles. We headed back down the Gibeault Road to Boundary Road to Crysler. Every road trip requires a breakfast
stop, so when we looked around for a likely spot, we found Tony and Heather in Tony’s Chip Stand (and restaurant). We quickly discovered that not only can Heather make a great breakfast (try
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their special ham), but Tony is a walking encyclopedia of local history. “This is my home,” he told us, “and
we want our customers to feel it is their home too.” We motored south on Route 12
through prosperous farm country to Berwick, then Finch (saw a “moose mail box” near Newington) and on to Lunenburg. We turned east towards St. Andrews
on Route 18, and watched as the topography changed from flat farm land to a rolling ocean of fields and woods. We just “had” to head south on Route
138 to visit D. Johnson’s Antiques & Reproductions to see what he had. Then we “had” to return to St. Andrew’s, because we were told “the ruins” were in St Raphaels. History is everywhere around here.
Did you know that St Andrew’s was named after Scotland’s patron saint back in the 1780s, and it’s home to the oldest remaining stone structure in Ontario (a church built in 1801)? I was also amazed to find that Simon
Fraser, the famous fur trader and explorer whose legacy includes his name on a university and famous B.C. River, settled here. He is buried in the local cemetery along with the first Premier of Ontario, John Sanfield Macdonald. Even the “local watering hole” (Quinn’s Inn) is an old stagecoach inn, built back in 1865 − how great is that! Back on Route 18, we enjoyed the
rolling landscape while we followed a ridge with the mountains on the southern
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