It's been five years since Kathleen Edwards sauntered onto the Canadian music scene with the release of Failer, a stunning and transcendent collection of rural-inflected roots music. Her 2005 follow-up, Back to Me, confirmed her status as one of Canada’s most promising young songwriting talents, and she was soon sharing the stage with names like Willie Nelson, John Prine and My Morning Jacket.

After years of touring, she took some time off, but she’s heading out again in support of her new album, Asking for Flowers, released this month by MapleMusic Recordings. Edwards’ music is gritty and restless and often devastatingly beautiful—the sort of stuff that seems to emanate from the unclaimed grounds of our immense country.

The Ottawa native now lives in Hamilton, and as a self-admitted oenophile, she lists the countryside of the Niagara Region as one of her favourite places.

“There’s a beautiful belt of wineries outside Hamilton and I just love being out there. I had some time off last year, and I actually spent some of it working at Tawse Winery (3955 Cherry Ave., Vineland, Ont.; 905-562-9500) in Beamsville. It’s an incredible place; it’s geothermally heated and cooled, and the processing they do there is gravity-fed and energy efficient. It’s quite small, but it’s a really cool and authentic winery.

“Working at the winery turned out to be a lot of fun—I’d been on the road for a long time, and I really needed to step back from things for a bit. A good friend of my husband’s is a master carpenter, and he was working at Tawse and invited us to come out there to visit. The winemakers were great guys, so I told them that I had time off and that I’d love to come work for them.

“I don’t think they took me seriously at first, but when I kept offering they said, ‘Well, if you’re serious, come on Monday.’ So I showed up and they put me to work. I basically worked down in the basement—and it was definitely a manual labour job—but I really enjoyed it.

“The drive out there is really picturesque, and there are orchards and farm markets all along King Street. The area where the vineyards are is part of the Niagara Escarpment; the land flows from Lake Ontario up into the wine belt, so there are beautiful views as well. It’s an area that not many people know about, and it’s definitely an up-and-coming destination. Towns like Beamsville and Jordan Station make for such great day trips—they’re so close to Toronto, and there are so many B&Bs and restaurants and wineries.

“It’s just such an incredible place out there. Fielding Estate Winery (4020 Locust Lane, Beamsville, Ont.; 888-778-7758) is another excellent winery, and Malivoire Wine Company (4260 King St. E., Beamsville, Ont.; 866-644-2244) and Cave Spring Cellars (3836 Main St., Jordan, Ont.; 905-562-3581) are great ones as well.

“It’s funny, but my other favourite places to go are Napa and Sonoma and the Okanagan—I’m not sure what that says about me, but the wineries in those places are just out of this world. I love wine tours and wine valleys; all of the vineyard areas are great agricultural communities, and they’re always home to really honest and interesting cultures of people. The people are essentially just farmers, and that feels like such a rich thing to me.”