It’s a familiar scene: the wine barrel bar, French doors leading to rolling pastures, racks of bottles full of ruby-hued liquid, and a dead body in the cellar.

Wining and Dying, directed by Deb Smith for Prince Edward Community Theatre, takes the whodunnit formula from a stately manor to a winery in Prince Edward County. 

Everyone at Diamond Estates is preparing to celebrate winning the prestigious Tres Haute Prix for their Cracklin’ Rosie, a sparkling marquette of a vintage not nearly as old as its soft rock name. 

Everyone, that is, except Chuck Diamond. He is married to Amy, the daughter of Bordeaux transplants to the County. While Amy (Kim Kennedy) has steered the winery to success, Chuck has threatened it at every turn by embezzling, gallivanting, meddling, and filandering. That he would show up late to the party seems routine — until he turns up dead.

The question isn’t who killed Chuck, but rather who wouldn’t kill Chuck? Of the nine present, everyone seems to have a motive — and a nine millimeter pistol. 

Detective Jules Christie (Tom Higginbottom) asks everyone to stay put while each is pulled into a room for interrogation. 

Wining and Dying is a murder mystery where every plot development comes with a wink at the audience. It is in the tradition of whodunnit comedies–Knives Out, Clue, Gosford Park—that send-up the conventions of the genre with great appreciation. 

The play takes the sub-genre a step-further, at times laughing at its own jokes: the caterer Damon Chandler (Adam McGowan) serves up a “red herring” with a wry smile.

Fans of the genre will have fun parsing the play’s many references, from the dialogue to the score. Each character is surnamed after a famous mystery author, Daphne DuMaurier, Raymond Chandler, and Arthur Conan Doyle feature, to name a few. Meanwhile, dramatic beats are punctuated with familiar scores ranging from Pink Panther to Psycho. 

The play was written by Canadian playwright Katherine Albers and it was originally set in Niagara on the Lake. It’s fitting that this remount is in the other Ontario wine region. 

One of the central tensions, perhaps strong enough to murder over, is between old world and new world wines. When a disgruntled would-be critic shows up from Paris to lambast Diamond Estates for getting the award, Amy must defend her French-born parents’ choice of the young vines of the County. 

It proves to be an even more delicate subject when a jealous neighbour covets Amy’s fertile soil; just a few metres away, his own vines, languishing in clay, threaten to bankrupt him. 

The stakes are prescient: the County reports a quarter of its wineries are for sale, and some abandoned vines are deteriorating with overgrowth. 

There’s also much to be made of the winning vintage as a “sparkling marquette.”

Marquette is a North American hybrid grape that was created at the University of Minnesota in 2006. It’s a cold hardy grape that does well in Prince Edward County’s climate, where some European grapes may wither and die. According to producer Bill Sedgwick, there is no sparkling variety. 

As the suspects await their turn in the interrogation room, they glug back glass upon glass until the truth is revealed in a shocking twist. While Wining and Dying brings many laughs, it ends on a dry note.