| Jancis Robinson, one of the brightest and most influential wine scribes from England toasted and then roasted Canadian wine industry when she visited this land of maple syrup recently, reports the Vancouver Sun.
Robinson was on a visit to Ontario to taste Canadian wines. She tasted about 70 of their wines. She rated 17 wines out of the 70 sampled as 'world class'. Those included a number of British Columbia Okanagan Valley that she characterized as different from the rest of the country.
'In my experience no nation is more defensive about their wines than the Canadians, perhaps because they have so little vineyard, less than, say, Slovenia or Japan . Every time I go there to launch a book, usually a reference book about the wines of the world, I am berated for not having devoted more space to the land of maple syrup. I suspect this is partly because Canadians tend to be fed stories which rather overstate Canadian wine's place in the world of wine', she writes in her column in Financial Times.
She suspects "partly because Canadians tend to be fed stories which rather overstate Canadian wine's place in the world of wine. Every time a Canadian wine achieves anything outside Canada, this is made the subject of a major news story, and the Canadian wine industry seems to delight in perpetuating similarly flattering propositions."
'It is popularly believed, for instance, that one of the favourite activities of China's legion of counterfeiters is nothing to do with Gucci or Louis Vuitton but producing fake versions of Canada's most famous dessert wine (Icewine) made from frozen grapes, crisp as an icicle', says she.
'It did seem to me as though the best wines were made by quite a small number of superior producers, among them Canada's highest-profile joint ventures, Clos Jordanne (Boisset of Burgundy, with the dominant Canadian wine company Vincor, recently acquired by the American Constellation group) and Osoyoos Larose (Vincor with the owners of Bordeaux's Second Growth, Ch Gruaud Larose) together with some of Canada's best-travelled winemakers.'
Most of Canada's bigger producers have since long revved up their revenues by selling blends of basic wines imported in bulk and a small amount of domestic wine, until recently labelled extremely misleadingly. Today these blends are slightly easier to distinguish from the all-Canadian Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) wines by being labelled, in small letters: 'Cellared in Canada. This bottle contains a mixture of imported and local wine'.
Read full report on http://www.canada.com
To read her article on Canadian wines, click http://www.ft.com |
