If Christ turned water into wine, a watery journey has helped turn one of Christ’s churches into a wine store.
On May 5, a converted ferry laboured along the treacherous Bay of Fundy and up the Avon River carrying 30-tonne, 19th-century St. Matthew’s Anglican Church from its original site in Walton, N.S., to Newport Landing in the Annapolis Valley.
“St. Matthews had a journey lasting just over 24 hours riding tides that fell and rose over 43 feet,” says Stewart Creaser, the vintner who, with his wife, Lorraine Vassalo, purchased the church last year. St. Matthew’s had to wait out the winter by the bay before it was safe to move it. From the landing, the pale blue wooden house of worship, begun in 1837 and opened in 1844, will travel this week by flatbed truck about a kilometre down the road to its new home at the Avondale Sky Winery.