At five o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, six guests at Kat Florence Hotel in Elora, Ontario take their seats for a tasting of wines most collectors will never drink. The bottles are 100-point auction wines, some valued at up to $20,000 each. The charge to the people drinking them is zero. The tastings began on October 20, and they are now part of every stay.
The hotel occupies a restored 1848 limestone building on the Grand River and was founded by Kat Florence, a jewellery designer known for record-setting gemstones. A stay there already runs against the usual arithmetic of luxury hotels. The nightly multi-course dinner, cooked by a rotating cast of celebrity chefs, is included in the rate. So are a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on arrival, a 60-minute La Mer massage, and a Rolls-Royce and Bentley chauffeur service. The wine program takes that logic to its limit. The rarest bottles in the cellar are opened for guests instead of sold to them.
Six seats, first booked
The tastings stay small on purpose. No more than six staying guests attend each session, seats go to whoever books first, and reservations are made through each guest’s personal concierge. Every wine poured carries a perfect 100-point score, a rating achieved by only 0.1 to 0.3 percent of the wines in the world, according to the hotel. The bottles are sourced from leading auctions, and choosing them is a full-time job.
It belongs to Elizabeth Davies, Florence’s personal sommelier. Davies has worked in luxury hospitality for more than 20 years. She is a certified sommelier through the Court of Master Sommeliers, teaches wine education at George Brown College in Toronto, and helps write the certification curriculum for the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers. At the hotel, she keeps Florence’s private cellar stocked with bottles that rarely reach a restaurant list. “As Kat Florence’s personal sommelier, my role is much like that of her in-house gem hunter,” Davies said. “Instead of rare gemstones, I’m searching the world for extraordinary, ultra-rare, and 100-point wines.” The arrangement suits her precisely because the bottles get opened. “What makes this opportunity even more remarkable is that Kat doesn’t simply collect these treasures,” she said. “She shares them with her guests.”
A new name on the chef roster
The tasting hour sits at 5 p.m. because of what follows it: the nightly chef’s tasting dinner, also included in the rate, where guests learn which chef is cooking only when the food arrives. This month the rotation gained Shai-Ann Tyson, a finalist on Top Chef Canada Season 12. In 2023 she won the Garland Canada Culinary Competition, the first woman of color to take that title, and she is a Canadian regional finalist for the 2026-2027 S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition. She joins Anthony Bish, Marc Collyer, Dale Mackay and Neill Anthony on a roster that cooks for a handful of guests a night.
The scale is part of the statement. Florence grew up in Elora and spent three years restoring the former Commercial Hotel before opening it in late 2024, and the house takes only a handful of guests at a time. This season her name goes on the village itself: the Elora Christmas Market, presented by Kat Florence, returns November 14 through Christmas Day, with artisanal chalets and more than 100,000 lights.
Florence’s instinct to give away the best of the house is visible in the building itself, where multimillion-dollar gemstones sit on display inside the original limestone walls for guests to walk past. The wine now follows the same rule as the stones. “It is included in every stay,” Florence said, “because the finest things in life are meant to be shared.” The full announcement is at PR Newswire.
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