The Wines of Canada

By Rod Phillips

Wine has been made commercially in Canada since the mid-1800s but Canadian wine has only really begun to register with professionals and consumers outside the country in the last few decades, as quality has dramatically improved. Canadian wine is now being exported in meaningful volumes to the USA, Asia and Europe and since the beginning of this century the number of wineries has increased more than 250 per cent. In recent years wine regions have been demarcated (with some divided into sub-appellations), provincial wine laws have been adopted and indigenous and hybrid vines have largely been replaced by Vitis vinifera varieties in the main wine regions.
After taking readers through the history of winemaking in Canada, The wines of Canada provides an overview of the country’s wine regions, their climate, soil and other geographic conditions, and explains noteworthy viticultural and winemaking techniques, such as the practice in some regions of burying vines to protect them from extreme winter temperatures. Phillips details key producers of the main wine-producing provinces (British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia), assessing their wines and providing relevant details for those planning winery visits. The book concludes with appendices covering vintage reports, Canadian wine festivals and provincial wine-selling laws.
As the first comprehensive guide to one of the wine world’s rising stars, The wines of Canada is an eye-opening book for scholars, students and wine aficionados alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Académie du Vin Library
• Release date: Sep 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781917084222

Rod Phillips

Rod Phillips is a professor of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has written a number of books on European history, and, more recently, on the history of food and drink, with books including A Short History of Wine, Alcohol: A History (named a Book of the Year for 2014 on jancisrobinson.com), and French Wine: A History. General Editor of the forthcoming six-volume A Cultural History of Alcohol, he writes regularly for the wine media and also judges in wine competitions.

Book preview

THE CLASSIC WINE LIBRARY

Editorial board: Sarah Jane Evans, Richard Mayson

and James Tidwell MS

There is something uniquely satisfying about a good wine book, preferably read with a glass of the said wine in hand. The Classic Wine Library is a series of wine books written by authors who are both knowledgeable and passionate about their subject. Each title in The Classic Wine Library covers a wine region, country or type and together the books are designed to form a comprehensive guide to the world of wine as well as an enjoyable read, appealing to wine professionals, wine lovers, tourists, armchair travellers and wine trade students alike.

The series:

Port and the Douro, Richard Mayson

Cognac: The story of the world’s greatest brandy, Nicholas Faith

Sherry, Julian Jeffs

Madeira: The islands and their wines, Richard Mayson

The wines of Austria, Stephen Brook

Biodynamic wine, Monty Waldin

The story of champagne, Nicholas Faith

The wines of Faugères, Rosemary George

Côte d’Or, Raymond Blake

The wines of Canada, Rod Phillips

THE WINES OF

CANADA

ROD PHILLIPS

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.The story of Canadian wine

2.Canadian wine today: the big picture

3.The wines of British Columbia

4.The wines of Ontario

5.The wines of Quebec

6.The wines of the Atlantic Provinces

Appendix I: Vintage reports, 2011–2016: British Columbia and Ontario

Appendix II: Selling and buying wine in Canada

Appendix III: Wine festivals that feature Canadian wine

Glossary

Resources

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

Canada is a very big country with a very small wine industry. In land area it is second only to Russia, but in annual wine production it makes less than one per cent of the world’s wine and ranks with countries such as the Czech Republic, Algeria, and Macedonia. Yet despite the very small production quantities, Canadian wines are starting to make a name for themselves on some international markets. Canadian icewine has for many years been sought after, especially in East Asia and the United States, and more recently Canadian table wines have been exported in small volumes to Great Britain, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Canada does not produce enough wine to compete with Chile, Argentina, South Africa, California, and Australia on the mass wine market, but quality Canadian wines are finding their way onto higher-end restaurant wine lists and into speciality wine stores in a number of countries.

These are still early days in the modern Canadian wine industry. More than 500 of Canada’s 700 wineries have opened since 2000, but the great majority produce very small volumes of wine, and only a few dozen systematically export their wines. Although most wine professionals and many wine consumers around the world are familiar with Canadian icewine, and some are familiar with some of Canada’s high-quality still and sparkling wines, many have yet to appreciate that Canada produces table wines at all. In 2015, while I was visiting Warsaw, I met a number of Polish winemakers and tasted their wines. Several of them were surprised to hear that wine was produced in Canada. It struck me as ironic, if not outright funny, that a Polish winemaker – a term that many people might think was an oxymoron – would exclaim in disbelief, ‘They make wine in Canada?’

Surprise like this is usually based on perceptions of Canada’s climate. If California has an image of being sun-soaked and hot all year round, Canada is often thought of as an extension of the polar ice cap, perpetually covered in snow. In the eighteenth century, Voltaire famously dismissed Canada as ‘a few acres of snow,’ and if the image has stuck, it is not all Voltaire’s fault. In a sense, Canadian icewine reinforced the image, because what makes icewine distinctive is that it is made from grapes naturally frozen on the vine – as one would expect in a country that is frozen in perpetual winter. The sole image of Canada in Vinopolis, the now-closed wine museum in London, was of grapes being harvested for icewine. It was a desolate scene: a snow-covered vineyard, the vines bare except for spindly bunches of shrivelled and brown grapes, with the picker – his beard covered in frost – awkwardly manipulating the shears with hands in bulky gloves. It looked more like a scene from the Soviet gulag than the production of an expensive, luxury wine.

But it takes only a little knowledge to appreciate that before grapes can freeze on the vine and give off the sugar-filled juice that makes icewine, the sweetest wine there is, they must grow and ripen – and that can be accomplished only in adequately warm conditions. While it is true that much of northern Canada is arctic in a strict geographical sense, many of the southern regions – most within about a hundred kilometres of the United States border – are warm enough to grow and ripen grapes, not only for icewine, but also for many styles of table wine.

This narrow band lies between 43°N and 50°N (about the same range as France’s viticultural regions), which is generally accepted as the northern limit for viticulture in the Northern Hemisphere. Along this band are mesoclimates in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and the small Atlantic Provinces on Canada’s east coast where grapes ripen successfully – mostly Vitis vinifera varieties in British Columbia and Ontario, and predominantly hybrid varieties in Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces. Climate is the main factor that has defined Canada’s wine regions and limited their expansion, but some projections of climate change suggest that as summer temperatures rise and growing seasons lengthen during the twenty-first century, many more regions will become marginally suitable for viticulture and regions now suitable only for hybrid varieties will be able to ripen Vitis vinifera varieties.

Climate change might well alter the landscape of Canadian wine in the next few decades, but at present the Canadian wine industry has reached a point of equilibrium, after a decade and a half of rapid growth in the number of producers. More wineries open each year, but the pace of increase has slowed. This is a good time, then, to take stock of the wines of Canada, and that is the purpose of this book: to provide an overview of the past and present of the Canadian wine industry, and to describe the regions, wineries, and their wines.

The wines of Canada starts with a history of Canadian wine, a story that might well go back a thousand years, although definitive records begin with European settlement in the 1600s. Commercial winemaking cannot be dated before the nineteenth century, and is not recorded with any certainty before the 1850s. This in itself makes the Canadian wine industry younger than that of almost all other New World wine-producing countries. The modern Canadian wine industry is even younger, and dates to the 1980s and 1990s, when wineries in British Columbia and Ontario began to plant significant areas of Vitis vinifera varieties to replace the hybrid and Vitis labrusca (native North American) varieties that had been the basis of their wines until then. The overall thrust of the history highlights the youthfulness of Canadian wine.

The next chapter surveys the main aspects of the Canadian wine industry today: the provincial wine laws (in the absence of a national wine law), delimited wine regions and sub-appellations, the grape varieties in Canada’s vineyards, and the styles of wine that are produced. There is also a discussion of the relationship between Canadian wines (which refers in this book to wines made solely from grapes grown in Canada) and the much larger volumes of wines that are either blends of Canadian and imported wines or are simply imported wines that are bottled by some of the large Canadian wineries. These are often misleadingly classified as Canadian wines, which has led to much confusion among consumers and in the statistical data relating to Canadian wine production.

Statistics in general proved a challenge in writing this book. Various provincial authorities I consulted provided me with varying statements and estimates of the number of wineries. Some refer to the number of winery licences issued, others to the number of operating wineries. Some counted grape- and fruit-wineries together, others did not. The result is that various numbers I refer to in the book are my best estimates based on the information provided, and I set out the range of possibilities. Then, some regions provide annual information by calendar year, others by fiscal year. Some report production as tonnes of grapes processed, others as litres of wine produced. I work with statistics a lot in my historical writing, and I have done my best to simplify and standardize the data here to make it accessible to readers.

The greater part of The wines of Canada is a province-by-province survey of appellations and wine regions, growing conditions, and producers and their wines. Chapters are devoted successively from west to east, to British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, the last a single province). In each case I have discussed only a number of wineries. My selection might well be controversial, but I have given more space to producers whose portfolio of wines strikes me as particularly interesting. I have also privileged wineries that are leading the way with wine exports, so that non-Canadian readers can seek out their wines.

Clearly, it is impossible to discuss all Canada’s approximately 700 wineries in a book this length. I wanted to avoid presenting a long list of many wineries described superficially, so I opted for a short list of a few dozen wineries that I could profile in a bit more detail. Hard choices had to be made, and although I consulted other wine professionals, the final choices were mine alone. Readers should not think of all the wineries profiled here as necessarily ‘the best’ Canadian wineries. Some of the producers whose wines I appreciate and enjoy on a regular basis are not here. But those that are included are worthy producers who represent the range of vineyard conditions, growing and winemaking methods, and wine styles in Canada today. Think of them as an aperitif to whet your appetite as you seek out the many other excellent wineries in Canada.

I invited about fifty wineries to send me information on their vineyards and production methods, as well as three samples of wine (any varietal/blend, style, and vintage) that they thought best represented what they were trying to achieve. I tasted the wines, usually in the company of another wine professional, and I describe their general style and quality. I have rarely referred to specific vintages, because many will not be available within a year of this book’s publication. These notes, then, are general, stylistic descriptions, and readers should always bear in mind that vintages are very volatile in many of Canada’s wine regions. For example, some Ontario red wines made from late-ripening varieties might deliver ripe fruit in warm years, but show some greenness in others. (There are vintage charts for the main wine regions in Appendix I.)

Many people have provided information that was vital to this book. From the various winery associations, I would like to thank Laura Kittmer (Wines of British Columbia), Magdalena Kaiser and Joanna Muratori (Wine Marketing Association of Ontario), Mary Jane Combe (Grape Gowers of Ontario), Laurie Macdonald (Vintners Quality Alliance of Ontario), Jean Joly (Vignoble du Marathonien, for Quebec statistics), Gillian Mainguy (Wines of Nova Scotia), and Caroline Henderson (Canadian Vintners Association). Janet Dorozynski is a fount of information on Canadian wine, Angelo Pavan talked about aspects of the early wine industry in Ontario, and Craig Pinhey helped with aspects of New Brunswick wine.

I also want to acknowledge the people at Infinite Ideas, the publisher of the Classic Wine Library series. Infinite Ideas’ owner, Richard Burton, first proposed the book, and he has been supportive throughout. During production, it was a pleasure to work with Rebecca Clare and Kim Stringer.

I am also extremely grateful to all the wineries, their owners, principals, winemakers, and other staff, for providing up-to-date information and wine samples specifically for this book. I cannot thank enough the wineries that have sent me wine samples, or have invited me to visit them over the years. I have been tasting Canadian wine systematically from almost all Canada’s wine regions for many years, and I have visited most of them. Some visits have been arranged, others (such as my regular forays into Quebec) I have made on my own. They have given me the opportunity to build an image of Canadian wines and to be sensitive to shifts over time. I also taste thousands of non-Canadian wines every year and regularly visit wineries in other parts of the world: Europe, South America, the United States, Australia, and South Africa. This experience gives me a broader context within which to appreciate wines.

The final point I want to make about this book is important: it is not an uncritical appreciation of Canadian wine. In my experience, wine writers tend to be critical in private but uncritical in public. They seem to follow the dictum that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all – in public, anyway. There are plenty of books that celebrate the wines of Canada, as there are books that focus only on the positive aspects of wines from elsewhere. Tasting many thousands of Canadian wines over the years, I have found that some are truly outstanding, many are excellent, most are good quality, many are marginal, and some are simply undrinkable. While I don’t dwell on the less acceptable wines here, I am critical of some regions and wine styles.

I have tried throughout to be as balanced as the best wines. I am certainly not comparing the overall quality distribution of Canadian wines to that of imported wines. The Canadian wines I taste on a regular basis are from producers of all sizes, experience, and levels of expertise, while the imported wines I taste are carefully selected by knowledgeable buyers. But I go off-track and visit wineries randomly in other countries, too, and I am under no illusion that all French, Californian, Spanish, or Italian wines are as good as those that are exported.

So I take a seriously critical view of Canadian wines, but I am generally very optimistic about them. Producers have made great strides in the last decade or two, and – although as a historian I am wary about commenting on the future – there is good reason to think that as they improve their understanding of their sites and varieties, their wines will only improve. There are still structural problems in the Canadian wine industry, such as the absence of a national wine law and ambiguous labelling practices, but I find no reason to be anything but optimistic for the future of Canadian wine.

Rod Phillips, Ottawa, August 2017

1

THE STORY OF CANADIAN WINE

THE EARLIEST YEARS, 1600–1850

Canada is one of the New World’s youngest winemaking countries, but it is possible that it is where the first New World wine was made. About 1000 CE, the Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson reached the present-day Canadian coast and a member of his crew – a German from a wine-producing region – recognized grapevines growing wild. Eriksson called the region Vinland, and later accounts record that it was given the name because ‘vines grow there of their own accord [that is, wild], and produce the most excellent wine.’ Once believed to have been on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Vinland is now thought to have been at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, in what is now Quebec. Eriksson established a temporary settlement there to pass the winter when it was too dangerous to return home, and it is quite likely that the crew tried making wine from these wild grapes. They would have exhausted the beer with which their ship was provisioned before starting its voyage, and they would surely have attempted to produce another alcoholic drink to replace it. Alcohol in one form or another was already part of the European diet.

Although elements of the story have been debated – the location and meaning of Vinland, and whether the grapes were actually grapes or other berries – it is an intriguing start to the story of wine in Canada. It is a story which did not begin until Europeans reached the country because the Native peoples of Canada, like their counterparts in most of the rest of North America, did not produce alcoholic beverages. Although some peoples ate wild grapes as fresh fruit, there is no evidence that they tried to ferment them or any other produce. It is not clear why most North American Native peoples – unlike populations in pre-conquest Central and South America, and the Caribbean – did not make fermented beverages. In the 1600s a missionary in Canada confirmed that ‘the Savages do eat the grape, but they do not cultivate it and do not make wine from it.’ His explanation was that they lacked ‘the imagination or the proper equipment.’

But grapes of the Vitis labrusca and Vitis riparia species flourished in many parts of their lands and immediately caught the attention of Europeans, as Eriksson’s visit shows. Five hundred years later, in 1535, the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed down the Saint Lawrence River, passing the probable location of Vinland as he did so, and found an island where wild grapevines were growing up trees, as labrusca vines often do in the wild. He was so impressed by the quantity of grapes that he thought they must have been cultivated. He named the island Île de Bacchus, before (more diplomatically) renaming it Île d’Orléans for the Duc d’Orléans, son of the French king. In 1603 the explorer Samuel de Champlain also reported masses of grapevines growing along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River and wrote that he made ‘some very good juice’ from them. But he clearly, and curiously, did not wait for it to ferment.

The presence of grapevines growing wild throughout Canada eventually encouraged many European settlers to try to make wine from grapes growing locally, just as colonists in the settlements on the American Atlantic seaboard – from New England in the north to Florida in the south – tried to make wine from indigenous grapes. When those varieties proved unsuitable for wine, as they often did, Vitis vinifera vines from Europe were sometimes planted. But unlike well-documented American experiments in grape-growing and winemaking during the 1600s and 1700s, Canada’s were only sporadically recorded. In fact the record of the first 250 years of winemaking in Canada, from the early 1600s to the mid-1800s, resembles a highly redacted document, with a few places and names visible, but the rest hidden from view.

What we do know is that there were continual attempts to make wine in Canada from the earliest days of European settlement on the Atlantic coast in the 1600s. European colonists were driven to produce alcoholic beverages for various reasons: alcohol was part of the daily diet for most men in Europe at that time; the colonists were initially reluctant to drink water in their new settlements because so much water in Europe was unsafe and they were suspicious of water everywhere; drinking (especially in taverns) was an important part of male sociability and definitions of manhood; and, last but far from least, the effects of drinking alcoholic beverages were enjoyable.

Wine was only one type of alcoholic beverage, of course, and the colonists could have made do (and generally did) with beer and grain-based spirits, because cereals grew easily throughout Canada. But many settlers came from parts of Europe (especially France) where wine was an integral part of the daily diet, and they tried to recreate these diets in their new surroundings. Others, such as the administrators and army officers who ran the English colonies, were from wine-drinking social classes in England. Drinking wine was something that distinguished them from their social inferiors, who drank only beer and cheap sprits, making wine important as a social marker not just as an enjoyable drink. For the clergy, a regular supply of wine was important for Communion, although the volume need not have been large – especially for Catholic priests because at that time they alone sipped Communion wine on behalf of their congregations. But the clergy – including members of the French religious orders that were soon established in Quebec¹ – were also accustomed to drinking wine on a daily basis. Finally, fur-traders had an interest in wine because they used it, along with spirits and other commodities, for buying furs from Canada’s Native peoples.

There are scattered reports of some attempts to make wine from indigenous grapes in the earliest-settled parts of Canada. These include attempts by the French and English in what are now the Atlantic Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador) and in Quebec and Ontario. In 1623 the Franciscan missionary Nicolas Viel noted from an area near Lake Huron (now part of Ontario) that when the wine which he had brought from Quebec City in a little barrel that held 12 quarts (about 23 litres) turned bad, ‘we made some of wild grapes which was very good.’ This appears to be the first record of wine made in Ontario, and it highlights the problem of importing wine from Europe to Canada: it was often unstable and spoiled, thus encouraging attempts to make wine, even from the questionable varieties that grew wild. But it was not a straightforward matter, and one missionary reported later in the century that he had been unable to celebrate Mass for nine months for lack of wine.

Despite challenges, setbacks, and failures, the belief in the potential of native grapes remained buoyant. In 1668 Jacques Bruyas, a Jesuit missionary in Quebec, wrote, ‘if one were to take the trouble to plant some vines and trees they would yield as well as they do in France … and the grapes would be as good as those of France.’ The reference to trees suggests that Bruyas was thinking of tree-climbing Vitis labrusca varieties, but he might also have been referring to Vitis vinifera grapes, as many vines in France were trained up trees in the 1600s. As for the belief that local grapes and wine would be as good as any produced in France, it was an expression of optimism common in colonial North America. We should remember that the quality of most French wine at that time was not especially high and might easily have been matched elsewhere, even using indigenous North American grapes. We cannot know how discerning these missionaries were, but two who spent a year on the north shore of Lake Erie (now one of Ontario’s designated wine regions) reported that they made wine from wild grapes that was ‘as good as vin de Grave’ – a reference to the Graves district of Bordeaux that was home to some of France’s most prestigious wines, including those of the Haut-Brion estate.

Some settlers in Quebec and elsewhere tried to cultivate Vitis vinifera varieties brought from Europe, but most of the wine consumed in the colony at this time was red wine imported from Bordeaux (and to a lesser extent from Spain). In 1635 Isaac de Razilly, the commander of Acadia, the French settlement on Nova Scotia’s north shore, wrote that he had successfully cultivated vines from cuttings imported from Bordeaux and that they were doing ‘very well.’ But he also noted that ‘vines grow wild here and from the wine that was made from them we said mass.’ For the purposes of Communion, wine was wine, no matter how bad it might have tasted, and the availability of indigenous grapes in so many parts of Canada provided missionaries with the possibility of making wine in remote places. But they so often commented on quality that it is clear they were looking for wine to drink in meaningful volumes on a regular basis, rather than to sip from a chalice.

Results clearly varied. The Jesuit priest Paul Le Jeune, living in Quebec in 1736, reported that some of his colleagues had made wine from native grapes: ‘I tasted it, and it seemed to me very good.’ On the other hand, the Swedish traveller Peter Kalm noted in 1746 that he had seen such vines in gardens in Montreal, but that it was not worth making wine from them, and the grapes were eaten fresh. In these circumstances, importing wine was the only option. When a noble officer serving at the French fort at Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia, died in 1752, the inventory of his possessions included ‘two full barrels of Bordeaux wine,’ two barrels of ‘Rancio wine’ (possibly sherry or madeira), a half-full barrel of brandy, and four bottles of liqueur ‘from the islands.’ All were auctioned off.

Despite the availability of imported wine, the impetus to make wine in the Canadian colonies must have been strong. Their American counterparts tried persistently to grow vines and make wine from the early 1600s onward, despite continual setbacks and failures. Many of their attempts with native and European grapes are well documented, and it leads one to believe that colonists in what became Canada might well have tried as hard to make wine, even if their experiments were less frequently recorded. Repeated attempts and failures suggest that lessons about the need to match vines to climatic and other growing conditions were very slowly learned and that determined optimism trumped experience.

The absence of any but a few records suggests that nearly all these