The founders of a cycling based wine touring company have chosen to hand over the handlebars of their business to Sandbanks Vacations. 

Sheba Zaidi, Genevive Savundranayagam and Erin Bury founded the County Wine Tours in 2017. The County Wine Tours was the first company to launch guided bicycle wine tours with local guides for small groups in Prince Edward County (PEC). 

Erin Bury explained how she was born in Belleville but grew up west of Toronto, and would always come back to Prince Edward County to visit her dad and stepmom, who live on West Lake.

“One summer, we were touring some of the local wineries, and we saw lots of limos touring people around, but no bicycle tours – we had been on bicycle wine tours in Niagara, so we saw an opportunity to launch bicycle tours locally since so many of the wineries are located quite close together,” Bury said. 

The County is Ontario’s fastest-growing wine region and The County Wine Tours allows visitors to sip and cycle through our beautiful community. With the tours based in the heart of the County, visitors can take a scenic ride along the Millennium Trail. The Sip and Cycle Bike Tours take guests on a gradual 18 km ride along the former rail line and through the quiet country roads. Visitors can also stop at a handful of wineries.

(Becca Lemire/County Wine Tours)

The tour includes a local tour guide, a cruiser bike, all wine tastings, and a stop at the SHED Chetwyn Farms alpaca farm. The perfect tour for couples or small groups. 

The County Wine Tours caters to young professionals who want to see PEC through the eyes of a local. Since launch, the company has completed five incredible seasons, become one of the top tour companies in the region and have a long list of customers and a great group of local tour guides who grew up in and around PEC. 

Savundranayagam explained how hiring local tour guides was essential. During the tour, guests learn more about the history of the area and PEC’s role as a hotspot for wine, art, food, and culture. 

“It also really became a family business – my dad Henry Bury, a retired Belleville Intelligencer reporter, was our head tour guide; and my stepmom Sharon Knight Bury was our operations manager.” She added, “Our legacy will really be the relationships we built with our guides and staff, and the amazing experiences our guests had and will continue to have moving forward.”

The three founders love that they played a role in attracting more people to the region and showed them why they love The County and its wine. However, Bury explained how all three decided to start other businesses and these businesses were increasingly taking up more of their time. 

“My husband and I started online estate planning platform Willful, and Sheba and Genevive launched mindfulness company Mahara.” Bury said, “We knew there was so much opportunity to grow The County Wine Tours, and we wanted to ensure that whoever was overseeing it had the time to invest in that growth.”

“Now that we’ve achieved what we set out to do, it’s time for us to hand over the reins to a bigger company, Sandbanks Vacations that we trust will take good care of the brand we’ve built and continue offering exceptional bike tours to visitors,” added Zaidi. 

“Sandbanks Vacations are the most respected local tour agency. It was an obvious choice for us to approach them, since we knew our guided bicycle tours would fit in nicely with their driving tours and short-term accommodations offerings,” Said Bury, adding  Richard Barrett, Founder and CEO of Sandbanks Vacations and his team have been wonderful to work with. 

“We’re excited that they will be maintaining The County Wine Tours brand.”   

Sandbanks Vacations said they are proud to have obtained The County Wine Tours. In making this meaningful change, Sandbanks Vacations is able to deepen its foothold even further in the County market by allowing itself to offer even more experiences for tourists.

 Sandbanks will continue to offer the Sip and Cycle Tour with many of the same tour guides under The County Wine Tours brand. 

“It’s an established name and a credible tour company with happy customers,” Barrett said. “It’s meaningful for us to acquire a friends and family-run business that added to the local economy by only hiring local tour guides. It is important for us that we keep that tradition alive.”