by Tony Aspler
Jancis Robinson stirred up quite a hornets nest following her visit to Ontario in December to promote the new edition of The Oxford Companion To Wine. An extensive tasting of over 70 of Canada s best wines was arranged for her. She also toured some
some Toronto wine stores and on her return to London wrote an article for The Financial Times critical of the industry s practice of blending off-shore wines with locally grown products.
Most of Canada s bigger producers have long bolstered their revenues by selling blends of basic wines imported in bulk and (a small amount of) domestic wine, until recently labelled extremely misleadingly, wrote Robinson. Today these blends are slightly easier to distinguish from the all-Canadian Vintners Quality Alliance wines by being labelled, in small letters: Cellared in Canada. This bottle contains a mixture of imported and local wine. I was rather horrified, however, to see in the LCBO s flagship store in Toronto how many of these blends were displayed on shelves all mixed up with VQA wines under the large banner Ontario . No Canadian I showed these bottles to realized that they contained anything other than their own wine.
Now that Canada is producing world class wines, it is surely high time the industry educated Canadians properly about their own wines. How is Canadian wine to establish a reputation if even the producers compatriots are cheated of the chance to taste the difference between it and the rest of the world?
Robinson s international clout emboldened the Ontario Wine Producers Association to call on the federal government for honest labelling.
Ontario still allows wine made from foreign products to be sold as domestic and displays it under an Ontario banner in the LCBO, said Donna Lailey, Chair of the OWPA. Wines blended this way should be honestly and clearly labeled: the country or countries of origin should be prominently displayed on the front label, and they should appear in the section of the store with wines from their country of origin.
Since its inception, OWPA has fought to change the practice unique to Ontario that allows import blends to be described as cellared in Canada. This misleading term dupes consumers into believing that the wine they are selecting is made from Canadian grown grapes, but by law it need only contain 30% Canadian wine. In 2005, a year in which local grape production was seriously reduced by severe winter weather, some producers convinced the Government to reduce the required amount of Ontario wine in these import blends to only 1% for the 2005 vintage.
The continued use of cellared in Canada and mixing these blended imports with real Ontario (VQA) wine on store shelves severely damages the reputation of all Ontario wine producers, added Ms. Lailey. It is deceptive and dishonest and it must stop.
