Wine with Ekta

Wine with Ekta 🍷Wine Writer | WSET, Ontario
🧀 Cheesemonger-in-training
💌Perfect Sip & Finest Bite
Founder
💻Digital Director .ontario
📍Oakville, GTA🇨🇦

🧀🇨🇦 Say cheese, Canada.From the ash-rind elegance of Grey Owl to the washed-rind depth of Niagara Gold. From the Alpine-...
04/06/2026

🧀🇨🇦 Say cheese, Canada.

From the ash-rind elegance of Grey Owl to the washed-rind depth of Niagara Gold. From the Alpine-style character of Louis d'Or to the clothbound craft of Avonlea, twelve cheeses tell a story that stretches from coast to coast.

What excites me most about Canadian cheese is that every wheel reflects a place, a producer, and a tradition. A farmstead Gouda in Ontario. Triple-cream bloomy rinds in Québec. A Québec goat cheese that became World Champion at the 2009 World Cheese Awards—the first Canadian cheese ever to earn the title. Clothbound cheddar on Prince Edward Island aged to something genuinely exceptional.

But this project isn't just about cheese.

For each cheese, I've paired a classic international wine match alongside a Canadian counterpart, because Canadian wine and cheese remains one of our most compelling and often overlooked stories of terroir. Grey Owl with Niagara Sauvignon Blanc. Niagara Gold with off-dry Niagara Riesling. Louis d'Or with traditional-method sparkling. Pairings that remind us just how naturally Canadian wines belong at the table and how Canadian wine regions can express the same harmony that has long defined the world's great wine and cheese traditions.

What this map shows is geography.

What it doesn't show is the work behind it: the farmers, cheesemakers, affineurs, and artisans who continue to shape Canada's cheese story one wheel at a time.

Today is for them.

Happy National Cheese Day. 🇨🇦🍁

🧀 Terroir. Tradition. Fromage.

Featuring cheeses from:


If you could keep only one Canadian cheese forever, what would it be?

26/05/2026

Some afternoons stay with you long after the last glass ☀️

Golden Hour Aperitivo was built around the feeling of spring as much as the flavours of it. Lavender at the welcome pour. Tiny bee charms woven through the table. Fresh flowers catching the late afternoon light. A room already filled with the scent of blooming herbs, citrus, warm bread, olive oil and ripening cheese before a single glass was poured.

A curated tasting table is not a list of good wines and cheeses. It is a progression, and this one moved through some of the wine and cheese world’s most enduring conversations. Loire Valley freshness beside ash-ripened goat cheese. The depth of aged cheese meeting structured reds. Salt against sweetness. Acidity against cream.

Each course was opened by a thoughtful olive oil bite from , shifting the room’s attention in exactly the right direction before every pairing.

What stayed with me most was how the room evolved through the afternoon. Strangers settling into quiet conversation across the table. Glasses lingering longer between pours. Guests returning to the same pairing they could not stop thinking about.

The best pairings are rarely just on the plate ✨

The next table is in planning. If this sounds like your kind of afternoon, the link to join the early access list is in the bio.

14/05/2026

Before crus, classifications, & tasting grids, there was the human need to make meaning from the vine.

Most wine museums show you what wine is. Very few explore why it has mattered so deeply across centuries & cultures. WiMu Museo del Vino approaches wine not simply as a product, but as culture, ritual, history, labour, agriculture, spirituality, & time itself.

The first exhibit brings together gods, symbols, & spiritual traditions from around the world, including Ganesh & Buddha, placing wine within a much broader human story that extends far beyond the cellar or vineyard.

Then there was the wheel of the months, where you sit on a swing & move through the vineyard year season by season: dormancy, pruning, budbreak, flowering, veraison, harvest, & rest. For those of us who study wine, the part we reduce to climate charts, technical data, & vintage reports. Sitting there, watching the vineyard cycle unfold month by month, you are reminded how much patience, timing, observation, & decision-making it all requires.

The museum is housed inside the historic Castello Falletti di Barolo, where Juliette Colbert de Maulévrier played a significant role in transforming Barolo from a sweet,often unstable wine into the structured dry wine we know today.

People often ask those of us in the wine world what continues to draw us so deeply, & why we devote so much time, study, emotion, & care to it.
Perhaps part of the answer lies in everything wine ultimately holds: history, ritual, labour, landscape, faith, appetite, patience, memory, community, & a sense of place that few other products are capable of expressing.

Wine speaks to the historian, the scientist, philosopher, the cook, & the poet alike. That breadth is what keeps drawing us back, vintage after vintage.

Places like WiMu remind you that wine has never existed in isolation from culture. It has always been woven into how we gather, celebrate, cook, travel, worship, & mark the seasons of our lives.

The deeper you go into wine, the more you realize it has always been A MIRROR of the people, places, & centuries that shaped it.

10/05/2026

Tasting notes: this moment.
Appearance: two women, one bag, zero glasses.
Nose: mild panic with notes of desperation.
Palate: soft, generous, immediately comforting.
Finish: long and well-earned.

Happy Mother’s Day ♥️

01/05/2026

The first decision at dinner in Alba was not the wine. It was the cheese cart.

At La Piola in Alba, in the same building as Piazza Duomo, Chef Enrico Crippa’s three Michelin star restaurant, the cooking is rooted in traditional dishes. Langhe on a plate.

In Piedmontese dialect, a piola is the village inn, simple, local, and built around the table.

The cheese selection arrived with honeycomb, walnuts, and preserves. Not for decoration. Sweetness from honey softens the perception of salt. Fat from the nut coats the palate differently before each piece. The acid in a preserve resets the register between milk types. These combinations are not tradition for the sake of it. They shape how the food is experienced.

Tajarin followed, the defining pasta of the Langhe, dating back to the 1500s, made with between 30 and 40 egg yolks per kilogram of flour. That ratio gives it its deep yellow colour and texture. For most of its history, eggs were costly enough that tajarin was reserved for Sundays and celebrations.

Across the table, grissini. Developed in Turin in the 17th century by a court baker for the House of Savoy, they are all crust, no crumb. Napoleon valued them enough to have them regularly sent from Turin to Paris, referring to them as les petits bâtons de Turin. Nothing lingers between courses.

Driving through the Langhe, hazelnut groves run alongside the vines. The Tonda Gentile Trilobata, the cultivar behind Nocciola Piemonte IGP, is known for its high oil content and low bitterness, and performs at its best in this part of Piedmont.

In the early 19th century, during Napoleonic trade restrictions, cocoa became scarce. Turin’s confectioners ground these hazelnuts into paste and blended what little cocoa remained. Gianduja was born from that moment. Turin’s chocolate culture, and the same foundation that later shaped Nutella, comes from these hills.

Thank you to Andrea Canaparo for the hospitality.

Everything in Piedmont comes from the same place. 🌰

29/04/2026

After three sold-out events last year, tickets are now open
On Sunday, May 24, Wine with Ekta Wine Courtier and The Splendid OliveThe Splendid Olive are hosting
Golden Hour Aperitivo in Oakville
Our only tasting experience this summer, designed as a smaller, more intimate afternoon

Golden hour in Oakville
A glass in hand
Flavours that keep you coming back
📍 The Splendid Olive, 393 Kerr St, Oakville
⏰ 3–5 PM

What your afternoon includes
🍷 A curated wine tasting experience
🧀 A selection of artisanal cheeses
🍽 Aperitivo bites built around premium olive oils
🌿 A guided tasting where wine, cheese, and olive oil come together
✨ A final, unexpected pairing to close

Woven through the experience, guest flavour introductions from some of Oakville’s most loved local makers
🧁 The Sweetest Thing
🥖 The Lonely Kitchen

A thoughtful way to celebrate Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or enjoy a unique afternoon with friends
If you’ve been looking for an Oakville wine tasting event, a curated food experience, or things to do in Oakville or the GTA, this is one of those experiences where the flavours stay with you

‼️Update: We are now sold out.
Thank you for the overwhelming response, truly appreciated.
We’re sorry we couldn’t accommodate everyone this time.
We’ll be sharing the next date soon.

21/04/2026

75 people. Lake Ontario out the window.
The room was full before the first pour.
This I keep coming back to that moment, because it is something I never take lightly.
Every person in that room chose to spend their evening with us
That is exactly why we keep bookings limited, the pairings thoughtfully chosen and the experience personal.
I started Wine Courtier because wine becomes more interesting when you understand the story behind it.
The region. The grape. The producer. And the cheese sitting next to it on the board.
Each cheese is selected with the same care as the wine, milk type, origin, age, and how it actually works with what is in the glass.
That comes from nearly two decades in hospitality and years of studying how flavour works.
This season is already filling quickly. We take on a limited number of private and corporate bookings so every experience stays at this level.

Seeing someone discover a new favourite or pause at a pairing they didn't expect... that's my therapy. What's yours?

💌[email protected]



(wine tasting Oakville, private events Oakville, things to do in Oakville, wine and cheese tasting, private wine tasting, corporate wine tasting, in-home wine tasting, curated wine experience, corporate events, client entertainment, team building ideas, luxury experiences, boutique wine experience, intimate wine tasting, GTA private events)

13/04/2026

Still unpacking. Emotionally and physically. 🇮🇹

Some trips carry you. This one I had to carry home 🍷

I threw a coin at the Trevi Fountain just to make sure I return 😉
The bag was there & made a far more convincing argument

💪Quietly doing the heavy lifting ✈️🚄🚗
from one stop to the next, no questions asked. Not even about the bottles

Because not every moment stays, some need to be carried home 💜

What are you carrying into this week? 👇





[italy wine travel, trevi fountain, rome, spanish steps, venice, florence, milan, piedmont, wine professional, italian wine, vineyard visits, wine tourism, volare, nel blu dipinto di blu, monday motivation, luxury wine travel, wine travel bag, countryside italy, train travel italy]

Indirizzo

Turin

Sito Web

Notifiche

Lasciando la tua email puoi essere il primo a sapere quando Wine with Ekta pubblica notizie e promozioni. Il tuo indirizzo email non verrà utilizzato per nessun altro scopo e potrai annullare l'iscrizione in qualsiasi momento.

Scelte rapide

Condividi

Digitare