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They come from across the Maritimes by the thousands — from Cape Breton, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and mainland Nova Scotia — dressed warmly with binoculars and bird books in hand. Every January, bird fanciers invade the quiet Annapolis Valley hamlet of Sheffield Mills by the thousands, hot in pursuit of one of Nova Scotia’s avian wonders — the bald eagle. In what has become a true natural phenomenon in the last two decades, the bald eagles of the Annapolis Valley have been making their way here from breeding grounds as far away as Labrador, to ride out the winter and feast on free handouts — hundreds of them, filling the skies like flocks of seagulls. It’s a sight to stir the soul of even the most traveled nature aficionado.

Congregating in large groups is a common winter survival strategy among eagles and many other solitary animals, including grizzly and polar bears.By shedding their instinct to live solitary lives and congregating in large groups near a natural food supply, these animals turn a sparse winter into a relative smorgasbord. But in the Annapolis valley, the plentiful food source is anything but natural.

In an ironic twist, the poultry farmers of Kings County, who once regarded the eagles as deadly predators, are helping the birds claw their way back from the endangered species roster. With the encouragement of Acadia University biologists, poultry farmers began the practice in the 1970s of letting the eagles clean up the plentiful supply of dead chickens that large poultry farms are saddled with every winter. The birds relished the free chicken dinners and have come back every year for more. The popular wisdom holds eagles to be majestic hunters, swooping down on live prey from lofty heights. But the eagles of Sheffield Mills behave more like vultures, eating carrion off the ground — an opportunistic feeding pattern that humans have actually known about for a long time. In fact, Benjamin Franklin felt the eagle’s questionable eating habits disqualified it as an appropriate symbol for the fledgling United States, and lobbied unsuccessfully for the turkey as the new nation’s symbol.

The free meals have had a dramatic effect on mortality rates in Nova Scotia, raising chick survival to an unheard of 70 per cent. Young eagles that traditionally wouldn’t survive a difficult winter are now regularly making it to adulthood and returning en mass to their Annapolis Valley haunts. The result is the largest winter population of bald eagles in Eastern North America — more than 500 individuals, according to a recent count by the Blomidon Naturalists Society.

Other birds come as well. Hundreds of red tailed hawks and ravens follow the eagles, feasting on the same free handouts. But it’s the eagles that garner the bulk of the attention from bird watchers. It’s not hard to figure out why. The bald eagle is truly awe-inspiring in every respect. The largest native bird in the Maritimes, the female eagle has a wing span of more than two meters and has been known to live as long as 50 years in captivity. She effortlessly soars two kilometers above the earth and builds nests that weigh more than a ton.

It was only a matter of time before someone realized the incredible tourist potential of this remarkable gathering. The community that did was Sheffield Mills, a pastoral valley town in the shadow of the North Mountain, just off the traditional tourism routes. The first Sheffield Mills Eagle Watch weekend was held in 1990 with minimal fanfare.  With February 5 statistically the coldest day of the year in the Annapolis Valley, organizers chose the last week of January as the official Eagle Watch weekend, with the next weekend reserved as a storm date. Since the first event, Eagle Watch weekend has grown by leaps and bounds every year, and is now touted as one of the premier outdoor winter tourism events in the province.

Organizers recently took over the Sheffield Mills Community Hall as an eagle watch centre, setting up displays created by the Blomidon Naturalists Society and installing a kitchen and washroom facilities to serve birders a pancake and sausage breakfast. The Nova Scotia government pitched in by providing highway signage to guide visitors to the festivities. And the people of Sheffield Mills and the surrounding area have responded in kind,  volunteering hundreds of hours of time to cook meals, host events and serve as guides.

Today, eagle watchers take part in a long string of church hall breakfasts, baked bean suppers and other warm respites from the cold January winds. Other area communities including Canning, Kingsport and Medford have joined the festival, offering their own eagle watch events and meals. The eagles are cooperative as well. As animals do when they get used to being the centre of benevolent human attention, they remain approachable and oblivious to the fuss.

The spectacular phenomenon is beginning to garner national and international attention, thanks in part to a documentary made by Canadian nature icons John and Janet Foster. But the numbers of eagle watchers seems to have peaked at about 3,000 people each year, with most coming from within a two hour drive of Sheffield Mills.  Eagle Watch weekend organizer Richard Hennigar admits that getting tourists, particularly Americans, to visit Nova Scotia in January will be a tough sell.  “If we’re going to take this to the next level, somebody has to invest some money into promoting this,” says Mr. Hennigar. “The potential is there to turn this into a major tourism event, but it’s going to take some capital investment.” He suggests the event needs to be packaged and sold in concert with other Maritime winter attractions, like whale watching or cross country skiing.

While serious Maritime birders can be found enjoying the camaraderie and hearty breakfasts at the Eagle Watch weekend, Blake Maybank of the Nova Scotia Bird Society admits that the event is not exactly a magnet for hard core bird watchers from other parts of North America. Southern birders do brave the province’s winter weather but seabirds are more likely to be the main draw — northern gulls, purple sandpipers and the puffin-like dovekie. The problem is, finding eagles in winter is not particularly challenging to anyone who has a general idea where to look. “It’s a pretty unaware individual that could go up there this time of year and not find them,”

The return of eagles across the Annapolis Valley marks a heartening tread across the province. No longer poisoned by DDT or shot by misinformed farmers, eagles have become a common sight in many regions, especially in Cape Breton and northern Nova Scotia. “We’re even starting to see them more and more in southern Nova Scotia and even on Brier Island,” says Maybank. “It’s very encouraging.”

With 90 per cent of Nova Scotia’s poultry producers located in eastern Kings County, the supply of chickens shows no sign of running out. But Hennigar says that everyone working to make sure eagles don’t become dependent on these free handouts. Farmers are careful not to overdo it, giving the birds a chance to forage for themselves on warm winter days. But while the winter food supply remains, the eagles will keep returning to Sheffield Mills — and the bird watchers won’t be far behind. “Eagles are long-lived birds,” says Maybank. “They have long memories, and they’ll remember that the Annapolis Valley is a very good place to spend the winter.”

IT WAS CALLED “Minnesota 1711” when it was first grown from a graft at the University of Minnesota three decades ago. When released to the commercial marketplace in 1991 the apple was given the more commercial name “honeycrisp.” Prized for its combination of tartness, its firmness and its brilliant red skin, the honeycrisp apple became an instant hit in the fickle North American fresh fruit market. Farmers around the world – in China, France, Chile, New Zealand and Washington State – wasted no time planting honeycrisp cultivars en masse. Nova Scotian farmers quickly followed suit, but they has a competitive advantage from the start – an advantage so beneficial that the honeycrisp is quickly becoming known as Nova Scotia’s brand of apple, according to Nova Scotia Fruit Growers Association executive director Dela Erith. “Nova Scotia’s climate is the perfect climate to grow it in,” she says. “The combination of our cold fall nights and warm fall days causes the apple to develop that incredible iridescent red color that it is so well known for. It’s an awesome product. Consumers love it.”

In fact, Annapolis Valley farmers have always had a competitive advantage when it comes to apple growing conditions. Blessed with the deepest, richest soil and the warmest and sunniest microclimate in Nova Scotia, the valley is a regional breadbasket, producing all manner of cash crops, but particularly, the brilliant red apple varieties that grow here better than anywhere else on Earth. Here the apple is king – celebrated with the annual Apple Blossom Festival, advertised on a myriad of fruit stand signs, enshrined in the local culture and cuisine. Annapolis Valley farmers grow fifty varieties of apples including McIntosh, Red Delicious, Cortland, Spartan, Gravenstein and Northern Spy. Once, farmers here squeezed twice as many apples off a tree as the global average, but the world is catching up and today Nova Scotian trees only yield 22 percent more apples than the average around the world. The province sells 35,000 metric tons of apples every year, worth about $50 million, making it the only province in Canada to have a net export of the fruit. Customers include the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

But despite a thriving export business, more than half the apples grown in Nova Scotian orchards find their way into the province’s fruit processing industry. It’s a prosperous business but not exactly diverse, says Erith. Historically, apple processing in Nova Scotia has focused on only two areas: juice and frozen pies. In 2001 the Nova Scotia Fruit Growers Association took a huge step to change that narrow focus, establishing a program with a number of industry partners to develop new apple-based products for the local industry. “The program is unique in the country, and it’s working,” says Erith. “We’re proud of it.”

The first thing the NSFGA did was to hire Dr. Vasantha Rupasinghe. An assistant professor and tree fruit bio-product research chair at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College in Truro, Rupasinghe is a leading expert on the apple and its molecular properties.“He’s the real star of our program,” says Erith.  Rupasinghe set to work designing new products for the local apple industry.

The apple’s ace in the hole, says Rupasinghe, is something that most of us have known anecdotally since we were children: apples are good for us. Apples have been branded in the human consciousness as a health food for thousands of years and it is a reputation that is well deserved. The ancient fruit is one of the world’s most potent “nutraceuticals,” a term the food science community uses to refer to foods with proven health benefits. The antioxidants contained in apples are the same ones found in green tea and blueberries, good for the cardiovascular system, for reducing the symptoms of diseases like diabetes and asthma, and most encouragingly, for slowing or even preventing the onset of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Rupasinghe is a busy man. He’s currently working with 28 apple genotypes to isolate the ones that have the most disease-fighting compounds, with the ultimate goal of producing a healthy super apple – one that can be marketed to health-obsessed baby boomers around the world. At the same time he wants to make the apple more user friendly. He’s trying to develop apples that are the right size and shape for processing, and to find ways to increase their shelf life or prevent them from browning too quickly, using health-friendly natural substances like cinnamon as preservatives. He’s developing healthy snack food products like apple chips, and even finding ways to extract the health benefits of apples and place them into other food products – part of a growing food industry trend that started a few years ago with Omega 3. “The trend is to incorporate the right ingredients for health and well being into things like milk, bread and the other foods we eat on a regular basis,” says Rupasinghe. “Once we thought we would do it with pills, but consumers don’t want it that way. Anything we can come up with that we can blend or mix into what we regularly eat – that would be a great value added product.”

Another way to deliver healthy foods with a minimum of effort is to create what Rupasinghe calls “healthy convenience food” – flavorful snack foods that satisfy cravings but also score high in vitamin, fiber and antioxidant content.  “A lot of people are struggling to eat five to ten portions of vegetables a day,” he says. “It would be a lot easier if they could get healthy, vegetable-based snack foods.”

Some of those snacks and food additives will come from apple peels. Now just a waste product of the apple processing industry, more than a million kilograms of peelings – packed with antioxidants – go to landfills or composting facilities every year. “If we can find ways to use the peelings that are discarded from apple processing, we can convert a huge amount of that biomass into neutrocueticals,” says Rupasinghe.

But despite everything else, taste is still the bottom line when it comes to the popularity of apples, says Rupasinghe. ”Consumer attitudes are changing. The last generation liked the McIntosh and that kind of a taste. The new generation is going for the honeycrisps and royal galas. It’s a big change in demography. We need to constantly upgrade our cultivars, to meet the demand of new consumers who are asking for a different taste.”

Hanspeter Stutz is one of the apple producers who is benefiting from Rupasinghe’s program. Stutz is one of the few apple processors in the Annapolis Valley who doesn’t produce either juice or pies from the fruit. In 1993, Stutz, an immigrant from Switzerland, fulfilled a lifelong dream by purchasing a foundering winery in Grand Pre, on the eastern end of the Annapolis Valley. He chose Nova Scotia because wineries in Stutz’s native Europe are nearly impossible to buy. Most have been owned by families for centuries, and agricultural land in Europe is astronomically expensive. After buying Grand Pre Winery, Stutz wasted no time establishing a catalogue of award winning vintages including New York Muscat, Seyval Blanc, L’Acadie Blanc, Marechal Foch and Vidal Icewine, selling them under his Domaine de Grand Pré label. Stutz established a level of quality early on, injecting a European sensibility into the fledgling wine industry of his adopted province.

But along with grapes grown from European stock on his own valley land, Stutz turned his sights to the Annapolis Valley’s ubiquitous signature product. His first flirtation with the apple came in the form of Grand Pre’s Pomme d’Or, a sweet apple dessert wine that get its complex caramel color and baked apple flavor from Spy, Ida Red and McIntosh apples, and its golden color from golden russets. It has been garnering a lot of attention lately, particularly in the hard-to-impress wine regions of France and Germany. “It’s unbelievable to me that there are old apple regions in Europe that don’t have a product like this,” says Stutz.

In 2001 he tried something even more radical – a hard apple cider product targeting the trendy cooler market. It was a huge gamble. Traditionally thought of as a low-class alcoholic beverage, cider doesn’t quite fit the profile of other designer coolers. But then again, Stutz Hard Apple Cider is a long way from the syrupy liquid sold in plastic jugs at roadside stands. Stutz’s cider is flavorful and light with an alcohol content of 4.5 percent, purposefully brewed in order to compete with light beers and coolers. “People are so surprised about the quality,” says Stutz. “When I took it to Germany everyone said: ‘We love the quality of this product. We love your packaging. We want to have your cider.’” Stutz says that in two or three years he plans to be exporting a million litres of cider annually.

“I’m bringing the apple to another level,” says Stutz, throwing out a new tag line he’s thinking of using in his advertising. “It’s not enough just to make, say, ten million litres of juice or produce one hundred thousand apple pies a day. We can do much more with apples. That’s my philosophy.” Now he’s setting his sights on the next value-added apple product in his arsenal. He plans to open a distillery, a rarity in eastern Canada, to make fine Gravenstein apple and pear schnapps using valley products exclusively. In the same building, Stutz is finalizing plans a high-end vinegar production operation and is looking into the feasibility of developing an athletic power drink to go head to head with giants like Gatoraid and Poweraid.  “My idea is to use Atlantic Canadian fruits: the apple, the blueberry, the cranberry, the rosehip to produce a high-end power drink.”

Diversifying his own product base is more than just good business for Stutz. He says the apple industry in Nova Scotia must diversify and add value if it is to survive the coming onslaught of giant fruit producers like China. Farmers also need incentives to stop the destructive process of cutting down and replacing apple trees just because the fruit has gone out of fashion. “What happens is that everyone in the world starts growing the trendy apples and price goes down. The farmer loses in the end,” says Stutz. The honeycrisp is a great apple, but I need Gravensteins, I need McIntoshs. If I give farmers a market for those varieties and give them a good price for them, they will have the incentive to keep growing them.”

But adding value to the lowly apple is not always necessary. In some parts of the world apples are considered a delicacy and affluent people are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of sinking their teeth into one. And no place on Earth has as many affluent people as the United Arab Emirates. The Nova Scotia Fruit Grower’s Association has come up with an unusual way to get its fresh honeycrisp apples on supermarket shelves in Dubai City. The organization has teamed up with Edunova, the education cooperative that markets Nova Scotian postsecondary education around the world. Education is a precious commodity in the UAE, and many send their children to Nova Scotian universities. Now Edunova and NSFGA have found a way to market Nova Scotian apples and education at the same time.

Whether it is as a symbolic gift for a teacher or a metaphor for a good idea, apples have had a long association with education. The Edunova campaign is encapsulated in a poster featuring a photo of a brilliant Nova Scotia honeycrisp apple. The tag line, in Arabic asks: “What can a Nova Scotia apple teach us?” Superimposed on the apple is the chemical formula for photosynthesis. The sales pitch at the bottom of the poster promotes Nova Scotia’s 11 universities to its Arabic-speaking audience. The campaign will increase awareness of Nova Scotian apples in the Middle East and help pave the way for an appearance by the NSFGA at a giant Persian Gulf food show later this year. “This is a great opportunity to leverage the awareness of Nova Scotian education into an awareness for Nova Scotian apples,” says Edunova executive director Ava Czapalay.

“The apple industry in Nova Scotia needs to be patted on the back,” says Erith. “It’s managed to be a leader in the industry for a long time, by coming up with new markets and new ideas. The apple industry isn’t a dull industry. It’s exciting and innovative.” It’s likely to stay that way for another century at least.

Sam Slick would have loved the current debate that is taking place over the birthplace of Canada’s national game.. The fictitious Yankee peddler who gave the world phrases like “six of one and half a dozen of the other,”  “I wasn’t born yesterday” and “barking up the wrong tree,” was fond of pointing out the foibles of small-town Nova Scotia. He would have found plenty snicker about in Windsor’s shaky claim.

In fact, the author of Sam Slick may have started the whole controversy in the first place.. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Windsor native himself, wrote a fictitious account of students from Kings College playing a game called hurley on a Windsor pond he describes as “the long pond on the ice.” The year was 1844.

That was all amateur historians in the town needed. They read Haliburton’s account, put two and two together and came up with the notion that Windsor was indeed the birthplace of hockey. The long pond in question sounded suspiciously like a watering hole on his own property, he said; and the game being described was clearly hockey.

The historians may be right. Haliburton’s account may indeed be a description of an early hockey game; but it requires a huge stretch of logic to say that because a hockey-like game was being played in Windsor in 1844 the town was somehow the birthplace of the sport. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Just weeks ago, an 1835 painting housed in Washington’s National gallery surfaced showing a game of hockey being played on a frozen pond in Virginia.  But even that painting is new compared to 16^th century Flemish canvas that shows people with skates and sticks intently chasing a puck around.

The debate is probably moot anyway. Like most of the things that spring from the minds of common folk, the birthplace of hockey will never be something that historians can pinpoint. To try and settle the controversy, a nebulous organization called the Society of International Hockey Research has set some parameters for the claim that are easier to prove. They have decided to bestow the “first”  honour on the community that first held an organized game of hockey with a set of rules; in their wisdom they decided that honour goes to Montreal. Back here in Nova Scotia the community of Dartmouth also claims to have a strong case.

Mainstream historians may question Windsor’s convoluted logic, but hockey-boosters in the town are no fools. They are using a technique that a number Nova Scotian communities have employed recently to attract their share of tourism dollars. Call it the manufactured tourist attraction. The town of Guysborough is banking heavily on its tenuous connections to a  (probably mythical) voyage made by knights from the Isle of Orkney 100 years before Columbus. The natural beauty of Shag Harbour wasn’t enough of a draw, so that community has started marketing to the world a Roswell-like UFO encounter that took place in the 1970’s. Chester Municipality has its own questionable piece of history: a potential tourism gold mine called Oak Island.

Sam Slick always knew the value of making people believe what they want to believe. Town officials in Windsor have learned that lesson too. If Haliburton hadn’t given them the ammunition they needed to transform Windsor into the “birthplace of Hockey,”  they probably would have come up with something else. The community has plenty to be proud of.

Windsor could be the birthplace of our national sport, just like the town of Cooperstown, New York could have spawned baseball. First or not, the town is a piece of hockey history, and the debate surrounding it is harmless fun. It’s a debate that will go on for years.

You might call it the epitome of living history, a public garden that illustrates all the phases of the Annapolis Valley’s agrarian development. But in a town like Annapolis Royal where history grows out of every nook and cranny, the Annapolis Royal Historical Gardens almost seems like standard stuff.

Despite its name, the 10-acre garden is just a generation old; but the DNA that it preserves is mostly older. The garden preserves plants rarely found in modern back yards and farms – giving tourists and garden aficionados a chance to walk through the succession of gardens that would have been planted in the town throughout its long history: a humble kitchen garden that helped sustain 17^th century French settlers, a Georgian English garden from the 18^th century, a Victorian garden from Nova Scotia’s Age of Sail. There are also more modern themed sections and a large rose garden with roses set in historical context. The Historical Garden seems like it has been here forever, perfectly juxtaposed with the Annapolis Royal’s historical ambiance. But it is a relatively new attraction, opened in 1981.

Created with the help of a consulting firm after a series of community consultations, the Annapolis Royal Historic Gardens started as a way to take advantage of valuable, if intangible, asset. Annapolis Royal isn’t blessed with a large population or an industrial cash cow. Most of the businesses that have grown up here have been of the small, cottage industry type. The town lies off the main highway and shipping routes out of the province of Nova Scotia. But it has one thing in generous portions — preserved history.

Officially, Annapolis Royal was founded in 1605, but the town itself is actually is a much later creation. The original settlement was on the other side of the river at a place the French named Port Royal. The French adventurers who chose the mouth of the Annapolis River to build their settlement chose it for a reason. The town that eventually came to be called Annapolis Royal sits on one of the most exceptional spots in Nova Scotia — at the crossroad of the Annapolis River that winds through a fertile valley of the same name, and the Lequille River that connects with the great interior river system that was a main highway for the Mi’kmaq people. The town’s harbour sits on the Annapolis Basin, a large bay nearly completely surrounded by high hills that can be accessed by sea only through a narrow cleft in the North Mountain called Digby Gut.

The town was first settled in 1605, two year before Jamestown was founded and 14 years before settlers arrived on the Mayflower, making Annapolis the oldest continuously settled European community in North America north of Florida.  For the next 100 years, the town site traded hands several times, becoming a permanent British possession in 1713. It served as the capital of Nova Scotia until Halifax was founded in 1749.

Today, much of the history of Canada’s oldest town has been preserved. Along with the British military stronghold of Fort Anne, the town has more than 150 heritage buildings on display, including the oldest existing wooden house in Canada, the deGannes-Cosby House that was built in 1708. A number of the stately Georgian-era homes that line the town’s main streets have been turned into heritage inns, and one is now a museum called the O’Dell Inn Museum.

If Annapolis Royal has a natural wonder, it is the tides that rise and fall more than 16 meters every day. Although a few in Quebec’s remote Ungava Bay might argue the point, the Bay of Fundy’s tides have long been reputed to be the highest in the word, generating a near-infinite amount of potential energy twice every day. Annapolis Royal has cashed in on at least a part of that potential. The town’s most distinct industry is its tidal power plant. The principal is simple: tidal water trapped in a holding pond just below the high water mark pours through a series of Venetian blind-like structures, driving turbines as the tide recedes. Every 12 hours and 25 minutes the Annapolis Tidal Generating Station feeds power into the Nova Scotia Power grid, at a rate of about 50 gigawatts per year. But the tidal generating station is not a large employer, and for the most part, tidal power has become what everything is in Annapolis Royal — a tourist attraction.

For now, as it has for the last half-century, the area’s fortunes mostly rise and fall with the tide of tourists that pass through every year. The town is close to ferry connections to New Brunswick and Maine and to natural attractions like Brier Island and Kejimkujik National Park. Throw in a recreation of the oldest French settlement in North America, an amusement park, resorts and a town with a distinctly 19^th century appeal and the draw is irresistible to thousands of tourists who travel through here every year.

Traditional crab cakes are usually associated with the U.S. state of Maryland, but Atlantic Canadians love them too. When it comes to crab cakes, simple works best. I like this straight-forward recipe. I’ve even cooked it on a barbecue with a fish rack, to very satisfying results. The coconut sauce is a tip of the hat to our region’s close ties with the Caribbean.

 Crab Cake recipe

1 pound fresh or frozen crab meat

1 cup seasoned bread crumbs

1 large egg

1/4 cup mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon dry mustard

Margarine, butter, or oil for frying

In a bowl, mix bread crumbs, eggs, mayonnaise and seasonings.

Add crab meat and mix gently by thoroughly. If mixture is too dry, add a little more mayonnaise. Shape into 6 cakes.

Cook cakes in a frying pan in just enough fat to prevent sticking until they are browned (about 5 minutes on each side).

Coconut sauce for crab cakes

1 cup diced fresh mango

1/2 cup diced banana

1/4 cup coconut milk

1/4 cup yogurt or sour cream

2 tbsp hoisin sauce

1 tsp grated ginger

1/2 tsp curry powder

Mix ingredients in blender until smooth. Refrigerate until use. May be served cold or warm. To warm, heat over medium heat in saucepan, stirring constantly.

An Annapolis Valley winemaker combines old-world tradition with an iconic Atlantic Canadian flavour

Despite the cobblestones and the Old World courtyard, despite the four-star restaurant in the basement and the marketing trips to New York and Toronto, Hanspeter Stutz is still essentially a farmer. He assumed that role the day in 1993 when he bought a mothballed winery in Grand Pre and began the painstaking process of turning it into a world-class wine producer. The Annapolis Valley business was an opportunity impossible to find in his native Switzerland. In Europe, most wineries have been family run operations for centuries. New winemakers are effectively shut out of the market by astronomical land costs.

Already Stutz’s products like New York Muscat, Seyval Blanc, L’Acadie Blanc, Marechal Foch and Vidal Icewine, sold under the Domaine de Grand Pré label, are winning awards and garnering world-wide attention from connoisseurs. “A lot of Europeans still have this image of Canada with bears, ice, lumberjacks and forests – never wine,” he says in his thick Swiss accent. “That’s going to change soon.”

Wine may be a new product for the Annapolis Valley, but Stutz is following a very old business model, one that has kept Kings County prosperous since Europeans first settled here in the 17^th century. The county is blessed with large quantities of an all-too-rare asset – excellent growing conditions. Here the deepest, richest soil in Nova Scotia combines with a steep, narrow valley shape that creates the warmest and sunniest microclimate in the province. The result is an agricultural bread basket that has made the county the largest food-producing centre in Atlantic Canada. One of the smaller of Nova Scotia’s 18 counties by area, Kings County accounts for 35 to 40 percent of the agricultural output of Nova Scotia, producing mostly fruits, vegetables, hogs and poultry.

Stutz is doing everything he can to add fine wine to that list. Fifteen to 20,000 tourists pour through Domaine de Grand Pré every year from bus tours and cruise ships docked in nearby Halifax. Many are pressed into service as tasters and impromptu focus groups by Stutz. The winery has begun producing a line of smoked meat products called “Alex’s Finest” after Alex Jurt, Stutz’s son-in-law and the chef in Grand Pré’s Le Caveau Restaurant. And every year, about a dozen wedding receptions take place on the winery’s majestic grounds overlooking the Grand Pre dikes. At the same time, Stutz’s wines have begun racking up awards, including a gold medal for its 1999 Marechel Foch Reserve at the 2001 All-Canadian Wine Championships. But Stutz doesn’t see himself in competition with other wineries in the province. Instead, he says Grand Pré is working alongside wineries like Jost and Sainte Famille to compete against the rest of the world. “We’re developing a whole new industry in this province,” he says. “We’re going to see Nova Scotia become known as a wine-producing region in the next 10 years.”

But Stutz has a strong streak of individualism. He eschews the traditional image trap that many new vintners fall into. No staid, old world imaging here – Grand Pré’s labels feature abstract art and computer age lettering. And he’s constantly searching for ways to give his products the same sense of place that winemakers in the Champagne and Bordeaux Valleys have mastered in the last couple of centuries. One way he’s trying to achieve that is by marrying several of his products to that most quintessential of Annapolis Valley products – the apple.

The apple has iconic status in Kings County. For 70 years the Valley’s most famous festival, the Apple Blossom Festival, has revolved around the fact that apple trees are once again in bloom and will soon be heavy with fruit. The history of the apple here is the history of the great entrepreneurs of the region. Colonel John Burbidge, who managed to skirt the line between slaveowner and international philanthropist, introduced the nonpareil and the English golden pippin to Kings County. Charismatic Anglican bishop Charles Inglis introduced the Bishop Pippin around 1810. Charles Ramage Prescott, who ran a produce company on Granville Street in Halifax, and whose Starr Point mansion is now one of the Annapolis Valley’s most visited museums, gave Kings County the ribston, the Blenheim, the gravenstein, the sweet bough, the spy and a dozen other varieties.

For Stutz, the apple is the essence of two of his newest and most talked-about products. Domaine de Grand Pré’s Pomme d-Or dessert wine uses spy, ida red and macintosh apples for its complex caramel and baked apple flavor. It’s golden color comes from golden russets. And the winery’s newest product could well be its biggest hit with consumers – a sweet, light cider with a barely perceptible 4.5 percent alcohol content. “We chose to make it 4.5 percent to make it the same as light beer,” he says.

When Nova Scotia Power built a high dam across the Black River to generate hydroelectric power, the deep v-shaped river valley flooded, creating a deep lake known as Lumsden Pond. To make use of this new recreational facility, the provincial government created Lumsden Pond Provincial Park adjacent to the dam. The park is small, popular and crowded on warm summer weekends, but for a picnic that includes swimming or cruising in a small boat, it’s worth the trip.

The area surrounding Lumsden Dam Provincial Park is spectacular. Situated on the South Mountain, near the edge of the Gaspereau Valley, the narrow roads around the park wind past several lakes, large farms and tiny, picturesque villages – great for exploring by car or, better yet, by bicycle.

The Gaspereau Valley is a quintessential agricultural region, a microcosm of agricultural activity tucked into a river valley only a mile or so wide. Patchwork farms growing everything from market vegetables, apples and corn, to all kinds of livestock line both sides of the slender Gaspereau River. Every spring, small fish also named Gaspereau make their way up the Gaspereau River to spawn, and in so doing become another agricultural product for farmers to harvest by scooping huge dip nets into the teeming schools of fish.

Sam Slick was a congenial character, an American by birth and a salesman by vocation who sold handy household items to the people of rural Nova Scotia. A “Yankee peddler” the locals called him in the somewhat derogatory parlance of the day. With his horse and wagon, old Sam plied the dusty dirt cartways of 19^th century Nova Scotia, looking for new customers to buy his wares. Along the way he dispensed witticisms and wry observations of the people he met during his travels, coining phrases that have become classic clichés over the last 200 years: “raining cats and dogs,” “six of one and a half dozen of the other,” “I wasn’t born yesterday,” “barking up the wrong tree” and many more. Today Slick’s traveler’s tales form a rich tapestry, painting us a picture of what Nova Scotia was like in simpler times two centuries ago.

A fascinating fellow to be sure,  but Sam Slick was entirely fictitious – the creation of the fertile imagination of Thomas Chandler Haliburton. The best-known native son of the Nova Scotia town of Windsor, Haliburton was a judge, a successful businessman and a member of Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly during the course of his eventful life. But above all, he was a best-selling author, whose book sales rivaled those of Charles Dickens during his lifetime. Sam Slick was his greatest character.  In the bestselling novel “The Clockmaker,” a compilation of stories that first appeared in a Halifax newspaper, Sam Slick observed and analyzed the foibles of Nova Scotians as only a perceptive outsider could. Readers across North America and beyond loved it.

Today Sam Slick is forever associated with the hometown of his creator. It’s a town perched neatly between the two parts of Nova Scotia. It’s just a short drive from the outskirts of urban Halifax but it is also the gateway to the rural farming country of the Annapolis Valley. Windsor has always sat at a crossroads. Until the 1680s the place where the Saint Croix and Avon Rivers met was called Pesegitk by the Mi’kmaq people who lived here. The two rivers were highways that they used to journey into the interior of the province, while the Minas Basin beyond was a holy place, the home of their demigod Glooscap. When the Acadians settled here around 1685, they began calling the place Piziquid. Later, after the Acadians were expelled from the province, the English changed the name of Piziquid to Windsor. Waves of settlers from New England – first, opportunists interested in the finely tilled soil left deserted by the Acadians and later, Loyalists escaping the aftermath of the American Revolution – built the town into what it is today.

Windsor was a magnet for 19^th century families like the Haliburtons. The town’s appeal lay in the fact that it was only a single long-day’s coach ride from Halifax, a geographic detail that made it a perfect retreat for well-heeled business people who wanted to escape the dirty, crowded confines of Halifax for a weekend or a longer vacation. In the days before automobiles and trains it was Nova Scotia’s first bedroom community, as the stately Victorian mansions that still pepper the downtown streets attest. The home of T.C. Haliburton is now a museum dedicated to the man and his most famous creation that is operated by the Nova Scotia Museum.

Today Windsor is a complex little town, the home of giant pumpkins, the world’s highest tides and legends about the birth of Canada’s national pastime. But its primary appeal hasn’t changed. It still attracts people looking for an escape from the big city, and it remains one of the most popular retirement communities in Nova Scotia.

 “Windsor is a great place to live whether you’re talking young or old,” says Janet White, associate broker at MacKay Real Estate in Windsor. “We’ve got everything that anyone could want in a small, quiet town, and we’re just 30 minutes from Halifax.” White lists off a string of attributes including the most sunny days of any town in Nova Scotia, a vibrant arts community complete with a cultural center, an 18 hole golf course, curling rink and a state-of-the-art hospital. High on the list is Utata, a gallery and art centre on the town’s waterfront that showcases and caters to the local art community. “Through Utata you can take a painting course, a photography course, a yoga class, anything you want to get involved in the local artistic community,” says White. And the Mermaid Imperial Performing Arts Centre, run by Windsor’s innovative Mermaid Theatre, provides a 400-seat venue for concerts, plays and other performances.

The natural beauty of the area is another magnet . Windsor abounds with walking trails. A highway causeway built for Highway 103 in the 1970s has turned the lower Avon River into a lake known as Piziquid Lake that is popular with kayakers and other boaters. Near the point where the river spills out of the North Mountain onto the floor of the valley below, a small ski hill – Ski Martock – challenges skiers from all over western Nova Scotia to develop their downhill and cross country skills. And the nearby Minas Basin, with the highest tides in the world, millions of shore birds and rich fossil beds, is one of Canada’s great natural wonders.

“We’ve been getting a real influx of people who don’t want the hustle and bustle of the city but still don’t want to live far away from it,”says White. To meet that influx, several new development projects are in the works for Windsor. A turn-of-the-century textile mill that has long been a landmark along Highway 101 is being transformed into a condominium complex called Mill Island. Across the Avon River in Falmouth, another project called The Meadows is well underway, and there are other condominium and new home projects also under development, says White. “Real estate prices are very competitive here,” she says.

Troy Kirkby is one of the new wave of Windsor residents – an Ontario-born businessman drawn to the town for its location and its small-town ambiance. Like old Sam Slick, he first came to know Windsor during his travels as a young sales representative. Today he owns and operates the town’s first authentic English pub.“Windsor is the quintessential close-knit town,” he says.  “I’ve made lots of great friends here.”

Kirkby’s pub, the Spitfire Arms Alehouse, is perhaps the most authentically Victorian business in this authentically Victorian town.  The establishment is a celebration of Kirkby’s passions – fine beer, history, music and all things British. Seventeen draught taps pour out the finest ales and beers available anywhere, while the menu offers distinctly British fare. Kirby presents live music at least three nights a week, featuring some of the best blues and other artists in the region, with no cover charge.  Close to 50 percent of the pub’s clientele make the trip from Halifax, he says.

Inside, the Spitfire Arms is a veritable museum showcasing the history of World War II. RCAF uniforms, a Delco bombsite, parts from a Spitfire fighter, medals, flags, war memorabilia from Kirkby’s own grandparents and much more adorn the walls and display cases around the pub, most of it from the proprietor’s own extensive collection. “I’ve actually got enough stuff to do another whole pub,” he says. “I’m a real history buff.”

Sounds like he’s in the right town. History abounds in Windsor, a heritage that’s much deeper that the size of the community would suggest. If there is an institution that exemplifies the town’s history, King’s-Edgehill is it. The venerable private school has its roots in King’s College, a 19^th century university that once had its home in Windsor. King’s College started here for the same reason that attracted rich Haligonians to Windsor. The university’s founders – United Empire Loyalists – felt that the bawdy seaport town of Halifax was far too seedy a place to shape young minds. Pastoral Windsor offered a more conducive learning environment.  In 1788, they built an ivy-lined college here beside rolling cattle fields, along with a private preparatory school called King’s Collegiate. The college was largely destroyed by fire in 1923 and moved permanently to Halifax, but King’s Collegiate remained. Today King’s-Edgehill, as it is now known, is the oldest private school in the British Commonwealth outside of Britain.

In the days of conflict between French and English, Windsor was a fortified town.  Today all that is left of Fort Edward, the fortress that once protected Windsor from sea-borne invasion, is a mound of earth and a perfectly preserved wooden blockhouse. Built in 1750, the blockhouse is the oldest surviving structure of its kind in Canada. Fort Edward was created to protect Halifax’s back door – to prevent an invading army from landing on the shores of the Minas Basin and attacking the city down the Windsor Road. During its history it took a prominent role in the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, was a temporary home to Jacobite heroine and loyalist Flora MacDonald during the winter of 1778 – 79 and served as a training camp during World War I. It was also the first home of the Windsor Agricultural Fair in 1765, an event that has evolved into the Hants County Exhibition. Held every year since 1815, the exhibition is the oldest continuous agricultural fair in North America.

Since the 1980s, one of the central events of the fair has been the annual pumpkin weigh-off. If Windsor is the capital of great pumpkins, it is entirely the responsibility of one man. Howard Dill, who died last year at the age of 73, was known as “the pumpkin king”  in the later years of his life. A farmer and self-taught genetics expert, Dill began cross-breeding pumpkins in the 1970s. By 1982 he had produced the largest pumpkin in the world, a 400-pound monster that would soon pale in comparison to later Dill giants. In 2007 a Dill Atlantic Giant pumpkin grown in Rhode Island topped the scales at 1689 pounds. Dill’s pumpkins also inspired Windsor’s annual pumpkin regatta, where competitors race boats make out of hollowed-out giant pumpkins on Lake Piziquid.

Dill may be at least partially responsible for Windsor’s other new claim to fame as well.  Many of Windsor’s citizens are convinced that the first game of hockey ever played took place on a frozen pond that is located on Dill’s farm on the outskirts of town. The town has formed a partnership with Cooperstown, New York  – “the birthplace of baseball,” – and now proudly calls itself “hockey’s birthplace.”

While hockey boosters in places like Montreal and Dartmouth vehemently disagree, the people of Windsor point to the writings of old Thomas Chandler Haliburton himself as proof. In 1844 he wrote an account of students from Kings College playing a game called hurley on a Windsor pond he describes as “the long pond on the ice.” The long pond in question sounded suspiciously like a watering hole in the back of Dill’s acreage, and the game being described was clearly hockey. That was all that local historians needed. They put two and two together and came up with the notion that Windsor was indeed the birthplace of hockey.

To this day, no one has proved conclusively that hockey didn’t get its start here. And besides – Sam Slick would have loved the debate.

It is a landmark that’s easy to miss – a three storey observation tower that sits in one of the highest points of land in the village of Chester. The unusual looking tower looks slightly out of place amid the stately old homes and the large wooden churches that surround it. It was built just after the turn of the century by Alfred R. Lightfoot, a wealthy New Yorker who journeyed with his wife, Zoé Valle Lightfoot to Chester every summer. On warm August days, when sailboats jockeyed to catch the breezes blowing into Chester’s Front Harbour, Mr. Lightfoot would leave his circa 1849 Cape Cod cottage, climb the steps of his tower and watch the races from the privacy of his own back yard. The little home that the Lightfoots summered in for a quarter of a century now serves as a library, the Zoé Valle Library, named after Mrs. Lightfoot who died in 1926.

Today, some pieces of the Lightfoots’ lives survive in the library — assorted furniture pieces, a bronze statue in the Club Room, old photographs and many of Zoé Valle’s own books in the library collection. But the tower in the backyard is perhaps the most telling testament of the lives of these well-heeled New Yorkers – most fitting because its purpose was to watch the sailboat races. First and foremost, Chester is about sailing, and the most important sailing event on Chester’s calendar is Race Week.

Hosted by the Chester Yacht Club every August, Race Week is the largest sailing regatta of its kind in eastern Canada – five days of parties, music, eating dancing and races, as modern yachts with fibreglass hulls and multi-coloured spinnakers compete for trophies and bragging rights in a number of classes over three race courses. Like many great sporting traditions, Race Week began on a bet, at least according to legend. It was somewhere around1885, a time when fishermen still plied their trade in wooden ships driven by canvas sails. No one knows exactly how it started, but as the story goes, a group of sailors from Chester and other local communities – Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Big Tancook Island and Little Tancook Island – got into a running argument about exactly who among them deserved to be called the finest boatbuilders on the planet. There was only one way to solve the conundrum. The sailors met in Chester for a race that summer of 1885. Whether the argument was settled remains in doubt, but a Little Tancook boat won the first day’s race, with a Big Tancook whaler taking the second day finishing gun.

In those days, there was no such thing as handicapping or classes. The first boat over the finish line was declared the winner. Nowadays things are much more regulated. The first official race week took place in 1904, four years after the Chester Yacht Club was founded. A poster from that year’s race read “Chester Regatta open to the world.” Today the annual regatta attracts everything from the great Nova Scotia one-design classes like the Bluenose and Roue/20 to million dollar ocean-going yachts. The whole village of Chester gets into the act, as the population of this small community swells briefly to twice its normal size. Garden parties, concerts and impromptu events are the order of the day.

As they celebrate the annual regatta, sailors and visitors stroll through a town that is one of the most unique – and wealthiest – communities in Nova Scotia. Huge modern mansions and stately turn-of-the-century homes proliferate throughout Chester – homes like the Captain’s House, a seaside mansion that has served much of its life as a fine restaurant, and Quedah Lodge, a circa 1865 Second Empire Victorian hotel that is now the home and studio of well-known Chester artist José Valverde. Some homes are still used as local inns, like the impressive Haddon Hall estate, and the Mecklenburg Inn. Once named the richest community in Canada, per capita, Chester has long been the summer refuge of wealthy Americans and Canadians. It’s Canada’s Cape Cod. In the days before air travel, they would journey from homes in New England, New York, Pennsylvania by train to while away the summers in their little alcove by the sea, a tradition that continues to this day. Old industrial families like the Morrises and Lightfoots have been replaced by modern multi-millionaires like Toronto publisher Christopher Ondaatje and American television producer Brandon Stoddard, both of whom maintain estates on islands near the mouth of Chester Harbour.

As visitors stroll the quiet streets the run up and down Chester’s hilly centre from tiny Back Harbour to the larger Front Harbour, churches are the only buildings likely to draw their attention away from the village’s impressive homes. Chester has a number of fine wooden churches, most of which cluster near the Zoé Valle Library. Most have cemeteries behind them. Their weathered and lichen-speckled gravestones mark the final resting places of many of the people who built this town, and a few who never set foot in it while they were alive. Members of the crew of the Young Teaser are examples of the latter. The Teaser is one of Chester’s most enduring legends – a ghost ship that is said to sail the waters of Mahone Bay on a never-ending voyage that began on her last day on earth. The Young Teaser was an American privateer, a licensed pirate vessel, that stalked the waters around Mahone Bay during the War of 1812. Using the Bay’s many coves and islands as cover, the ship would prey upon unarmed British merchant ships, taking them back to Boston to be sold for prize money.

On June 27 1813, the Young Teaser’s luck ran out. Five British warships spotted the lightly armed schooner and chased her into Mahone Bay. The chase lasted all day, with the Young Teaser desperately searching for a place to hide or escape. She was shelled by the battery at Lunenburg, and eventually made her way into the mouth of Chester harbour where she ran aground near Quaker Island. As two of the British ships closed in, the Young Teaser suddenly exploded in a ball of flame. The ship’s first Lieutenant had set fire to her to prevent her from being captured, but the fire had reached the powder magazine before the crew could escape. Only eight of the ship’s 36-man crew survived, and most were horribly maimed. Some of the men who died were buried in St. Stephen’s churchyard.

A more internationally famous mystery lies a few minutes farther from the mouth of Chester’s back harbour. From the low seat of a sailboat, Oak Island looks like a chunk of mainland, but the people who are reputed to have buried treasure here may have wanted it that way. Depending on who you ask, Oak Island contains buried pirate loot, Spanish treasure robbed from the Aztecs, the holy grail, Shakespeare’s lost plays, or nothing. For more than 200 years, locals and outsiders have been digging a series of deep holes following what appears to be a massive engineering project at least three centuries old. Searchers have found vertical shafts that go down at least 200 feet and horizonal tunnels that create seawater traps that have flooded the shafts and thwarted recovery efforts.

Next year, Chester will celebrate its 250^th anniversary. Originally called Shoreham, it was founded mainly by New Englanders who flocked to Nova Scotia after the Seven Year’s War to fill the gaps left by the Expulsion of the Acadians. Two decades later, another group of Americans came calling. In June 1782, the American revolution visited Nova Scotia’s South Shore when three American privateer ships sailed into Chester’s Front Harbour and opened fire on the town.

In those days, Chester was protected by a blockhouse and a militia made up of local men. The story has many versions, and may be a bit apocryphal, but it is said that on that day most of Chester’s militia were many kilometers away – either collecting firewood in the woods above the village or training in Lunenburg. To make matters worse, most of the powder in the blockhouse was damp and useless. The battery opened fire anyway, and a lucky shot hit one of the ships, causing the indecisive Americans to back off and regroup just outside of the harbour. Messengers were quickly dispatched to round up the militia and alert a garrison of regular soldiers stationed in Lunenburg, but it would be 24 hours before the first reinforcements arrived. Dr. Jonathan Prescott, in charge of Chester’s defenses, scrambled to prepare for a second attack when the Americans hailed him. One of their men had been killed by the lucky shot from the blockhouse and they requested a truce to bury him. Prescott agreed and invited the American officers to dinner for good measure. Meanwhile he prepared a plan to fool the privateers.

As Prescott and his American guests sat at the dinner table, a knock came at the door. Prescott’s son called out that a hundred men had arrived from Lunenburg and their commander wanted to know where they should be billeted for the night. It was a carefully prepared lie. Prescott calmly replied that they should be housed in a nearby barn. The Americans fell for the ruse and quickly excused themselves. By early morning, the three privateers had set sail, but the air was calm and the ships lingered in the harbour. Prescott realized that if they lingered there too long they would realize that the village was still unprotected. He needed another trick to reinforce his subterfuge. The fashion of that day was for women to line their coats with red velvet. Prescott had the women of the town reverse their coats, sling broomsticks over their shoulders and march around the blockhouse. From a distance they must have looked like British soldiers, for the privateers kept going and Chester was saved.

Today the story of the red coat ruse is a popular part of local lore, even turned into a play a few years ago to be performed at the historic Chester Playhouse. But most of Chester’s history has been much quieter. The villagers built a legacy of farming, fishing, fine boat building and craftsmanship. But many of their names are forgotten. The wealthy patrons of the town are not, though. Like the Lightfoots, they live on in the things they have bequeathed the town. The Eleanor Pew Morris Memorial Arena is one of those, named for the wife of a Pennsylvania industrialist. The arena is the place where local curlers, hockey players and figure skaters practice their skills. Before that, Chester residents played their winter sports outdoors, on a pond that was the village’s official skating rink for many years. Originally opened in 1911, the rink was created by damming a small brook that flowed through the center of the village. For many years the rink and the small park around it were a focal point of the village’s winter social scene. Starting before World War I, the Chester hockey team faced off here against visiting teams from Lunenburg and Bridgewater. On holidays and special occasions, the whole village gathered for outdoor skating parties, while on weekends, budding hockey players and figure skaters practiced their skills in the open air.

Today what’s left of the pond sits in a pastoral village park with a bandstand that is still used for local events, festivals and fairs. Lordly House, the village’s official museum, sits on a hill at the other end of the park. Built in 1806, Lordly House and the adjacent park property were owned by the Lordly family for 135 years. Original owner Charles Lordly served as Chester’s first municipal clerk, while a small building behind the home served as the first municipal office in the village. First opened as a museum in 2000, the restored home is filled with artifacts and historical documents from Chester’s past – a history unlike any other community in Nova Scotia.