Vineyard Culture
Exploiting the new prominence of Ontario wineries
By Fred Bacher
"I was very well brought up. As a first proof of so categorical a statement, I shall simply say that I was no more than three years old when my father poured out my first full liquor glass of an amber-colored wine which sent up to him from the Midi where he was born: the muscat of Frontignan." —Colette, "Wines"
Colette. In her story “Wines,” she tells of her early love for French wine from the village where she was raised. As Collette’s prose intoxicates the reader with its frequent imbibing from famous places, brands, and vintages that linger in the lexicon of French wines, you’re convinced that wine is so part of the French culture since time immemorial—this long continuum of popping corks—surely no other wine regions can make a claim against purveyors in Bordeaux, the Loire, and Champagne, the last of which produces a sublime “murmur of foam” in the mouth of the young Colette.
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| Donald Ziraldo, co-founder of Inniskillin Wines |
However taken I was by Colette’s story, I first read the piece the same year Hugh Johnson, most eminent of English wine writers, warned: "The French genius for taste and style is on trial." The French are stymied by strong showings of New World wineries in Australia, New Zealand, and California, the latter a culture so celebrated by many fine writers, so omnipresent in so many Napa landscapes, what’s left for imagination isn’t certain. The high quality of Ontario estate wines and their success, which has changed perception worldwide, brings us to Canada then, where a culture of food and wine is now emerging in Niagara. A wine story from a cool climate.
I’m sorry to say when I was a child growing up in Niagara, I knew very little about wine. There wasn’t that much wine around. I’d tell you about pairing grilled figs with a Baco Noir from Stone Church one early autumn night along a Welland Canal that smelled of smelts, but no, I cannot. Or the Lakeview icewine after a picking outside of Jordan when I was eight years old after I slipped and broke my Christmas corkscrew on the ice. No. These vineyards did not exist then. Though I’d like to drop the name of a noble vintage, I only remember very young vines and I have no Cistercian relatives of whom I can boast. The Old World of Colette’s childhood will never recall my own.
St. Catharines is the largest city in Niagara and borders many vineyards, but back then it was a hockey town, and in the world of beverages that meant beer. When I was a kid, the only pairings of food and libations were bottles of Carling ale with greasy chips and gravy on some big night down by the rink. With its hockey players, donut shops, and heavy metal music, the Golden Horseshoe, which stretches between Niagara, Hamilton, and Toronto, was the cultural backdrop used by one of its favorite sons, Mike Myers, in his mirthful, honest depiction of the region in the film Wayne’s World. As a sop to American audiences, the film is technically set in Aurora, Illinois, but in fact it is pure Southern Ontario, with all our quirky ways: the quaint insecurity, the innocence shown in a mimicry of rock and roll TV culture set in cars that speed away from strip mall donut shops. In that film, Tim Hortons, the donut chain started by the Canadian defenseman for the Buffalo Sabres, before he died in a collision outside of St. Catharines, is transformed into "Stan Mikitas," named after the legendary Chicago Blackhawk player who attended my high school. On the back of their 2002 Riesling, Harvest Wines recently lists Mikita as being from here, along with model Linda Evanglista and Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush. Niagara is the only wine region from a culture of ice hockey players, high fashion models, and stewards of heavy metal music.
In my high school years, if wine was consumed at all, it was in the guise of fake champagne, the mighty Baby Duck. A great Andre bestseller, this purplish and bubblish brew was drunk from frozen, teenage mouths on coal fields behind winter train tracks. Hardly the golden sunlight of the Côte d’Or. Burgundy was not a place, only one of the colors of dickies, those fake turtle-neck sweaters that teenagers wore under their winter coats.
As a favor to a friend, my father tended six acres of Delaware grapes in the Bench area around Jordan. When I was seven years old, I would sit in the wine cellar and have fun with the labels, mocking Old World icons of French wines, calling them Chateau This and Chateau That, rolling them on the basement floor, and putting them in rows.
My father, who grew up on a dairy farm outside of Delhi, would sample his basement wine nghtly at six. Punctually, he withdrew to the parlor where he played the soundtrack of Oklahoma every night. Oklahoma was the only recording I knew my father ever to possess. In the sixties, while I was watching Viet Nam footage on TV and listening to the Rolling Stones, Oklahoma was too sentimental for me. The success of this first American musical came partly from the sense of loss of the forties generation after they moved to cities after the war. My father may have used this system of daily rotation—a ground-breaking strategy that would eventually be successfully exploited by Clear Channel and others—just so I’d never forget him growing up on a farm.
There were no tasting rooms back then, no real wine stores either. I’d walk down the street with my father for his occasional bottle at the government-run LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, on King Street. Under fluorescent light in a vault of gray, concrete cubes, something like a New York State DMV, my father took a pencil chained to a bench, where spirits and very few wines were numbered on a sheet. Would-be drinkers stood in line where they "filed" for alcohol almost like taxes, putting their names and addresses on forms, then requesting, not the name of a drink, but something like a "C112-B." You could never examine a label. A bottle came down a conveyer belt from the back, and was tucked in a paper bag. Eventually, people from Toronto and Niagara had had enough and shopped for their wine and liquor in the States. The entire present-day LCBO, with its boutique appeal and inventory of international wines, came into being from competition with a single Buffalo store on Delaware Avenue, Premier Wine and Spirits (now Prime Wines).
Now Canada is producing high quality wines and everything is changed. Once serious beer men exclusively, even hockey players are talking favorite wines. Steven Page, lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, another local hero, emerges as a wine connoisseur on the front cover of Wine X from LA.
On a weekly basis, national newspapers fill with stories of professionals in flight from careers in law, banking, government, and journalism, for Niagara vineyard lives. As in the days of early Napa, writers and film people flock to Ontario. And this month, Gourmet Magazine is hosting a culinary/oeniological extravaganza devoted to Niagara food and wine, The Niagara Wine and Food Classic (Sept. 10-12, discoverniagara.com/nf_tourism/wine_food_classic).
A culture based on strip malls, television, cars: this we know. But now a vineyard culture is just starting in Niagara. What it will produce, we shall see.
Canada’s ambassador of wine
Donald Ziraldo. The co-founder of Inniskillin Wines is associated with Niagara-on-the-Lake, a place of considerable natural wonder, surrounded by the Niagara gorge and vineyards that stretch from the Niagara Escarpment. You’d think the cool climate would caution winemakers in search of high quality. But they’d be the first to remind you that Niagara shares the same latitude as northern California and is actually further south than Burgundy.
Ziraldo was born in St. Catharines, our aforementioned hockey town. Both Canadian wine and hockey were shaped by guys from nowhere—Wayne Gretzky from Brampton, Bobby Orr from Barry, Jean Bealiveau from Trois Rivieres. Among winemakers, Andre Pavan of Cave Springs is from St. Catharine’s. Ron Giescbrecht of Henry of Pelham and Joe Will of Strewn and Jackson-Triggs are from small towns on the Prairies.
Ziraldo has emerged as Canada’s ambassador of wine. The ambassador of wine sounds like a character from a children’s fable—a savior of the vineyards, who fights off the natural maladies and man-made troubles that have long endangered her small but universal womb—the grape.
In 1975, when Ziraldo started a nursery that supplied the first vinifera grape vines in the region, it wasn’t easy. Ziraldo had a fight to have the first operational vineyard since Prohibition. Soon afterwards, he received national press as a revolutionary figure in the business, a dapper guy in a white Mercedes who took the country out of a long, Lambrusco wine funk.
This particular ambassador is for real and quite down-to-earth. He considers himself "a modest Canadian." When he’s not flying around Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United States giving advice to winemakers, he sees many Americans going by his "front door" vineyard along the Niagara Parkway.
Ziraldo has a long history with Western New York. "We all speak the same language," he says. Ziraldo began his foray into Western New York, his first foreign trade market, at Premier. He considers Buffalo the gateway to America, a difficult national market with complicated state distribution. Architecture is another link. The Brae Burn Estate, an old barn with an oblong roof and pine interiors, is associated with Buffalo’s Larkin Building; its owner, Darwin D. Martin, was a big Wright patron. Ziraldo was inspired by Wright’s conception of "organic architecture," which was used on new vineyard structures.
Wine Enthusiast magazine selected Inniskillin as New World Winery of the Year at a reception last January at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, the same hotel where Ziraldo’s Italian immigrant parents stayed at the end of their honeymoon.
Ziraldo’s contribution to Canadian wine is more than the business of one winery. He has chaired fundraising for Niagara College’s ten million dollar tourism and hospitality center, including the just-opened Niagara Culinary Institute.
Viticulture research is an essential part of the current success of Canadian wine. Ziraldo sought $4 million dollars for infrastructure for the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute at Brock University. The project attracted the interest of the elite of the world of the viticulture world, including such luminaries as the Marchese Piero Antinori, Count Alexander de Lur Saluces, Robert Mondavi, Robert Drouhin, and Miguel Torres.
He gave initiative to the wine route through Niagara-on-the-Lake. He helped found the VQA (Vintners’ Quality Alliance), the standards-setting body. His strategy of high quality wines likely saved an industry challenged by free trade in the eighties. Ziraldo is also a central figure in the story of icewine. Karl Kaiser, Inniskillin’s winemaker, experimented with icewine in the eighties. Inniskillin eventually captured the coveted "Grant Prix d’Honneur" award at the 1991 Vin Expo in Bordeaux, the largest and most prestigious international competition.
The man most linked with the New World wines of Canada is the son of immigrant parents from Friuli, Northern Italy. It’s a place where men still take their knives and carve sketches in wood. His father, a gold miner in Timmins, Ontario, left Ziraldo a gold ring he’s never taken off, engraved with a cluster of grapes with vines and tendrils.
Ziraldo has remarked that "the wine industry here is fighting urban development over the fruit lands, over 600,000 acres of green space. It is one of the most important issues over the next few years, like Napa Valley, a reserve for future generations."
He’s committed to vineyard conservation, an issue that’s also supported by the Ontario Wine Council. Ziraldo hopes the Niagara Culinary Institute will prove an important center for the future of Niagara food and wine.
Niagara Culinary Institute
At the center of this cool climate wine region, the ground has finally warmed and given up its harvest. Wine climbs much closer to the sun before it comes to the glass, so it’s festive here this autumn.
Through the window view from the circular dining room, you can view the vinicultural spine of the Niagara Escarpment as it joins the college’s own vineyard. The restaurant at the Niagara Culinary Institute showcases the best ingredients of Niagara food as well as its wines.
A panned and poached Atlantic salmon over risotto comes to your table. You take a mouthful with the Riesling sauce. Luxurious pairings of wines with food took time to evolve and you can watch this here. The college’s own vineyard, with samples on the wine list, is starting to get awards.
The Niagara Institute is partially based on the Culinary Institute in Napa, which the college studied in its formative period. Like the CIA, the Niagara Institute is dedicated to the appreciation, study, and communication of Niagara cuisine and wine throughout the world.
"It’s a real anchor for the whole region," says Donald Ziraldo. "In every wine region, there’s always a culinary component. No matter where you go—Tuscany, other parts of Italy, California—there’s a great camaraderie in the wine community, so tied with food." I look around the room and sure enough, there is a couple from Peru and travelers from Tibet.
No matter which side of the border you’re on, the Institute celebrates a wine region central to all. We’re all apart of the Northeast wine region, the longest wine route in the world. You’ll notice car plates from Ohio, New York State, and Vermont. "The one common element is Niagara," says Ziraldo. The Institute is affiliated with Niagara University in Niagara Falls. Designed by Moffat Kinoshita Architects, it features two food and bake labs, a demonstration theater, classrooms equipped with Internet access for global lectures, and a wine tasting room. The restaurant serves sustainable vineyard cuisine from local ingredients.
Chef Michael Olson is head chef and teaches there. Western New Yorkers might recall his time at On-the-Twenty at Cave Spring Cellars. They serve stellar local suppliers like Kent Heritage Farm, Baldersnon’s Cheese, and Jim Thomson’s Hot House Flowers. Of course, the wine list is a show of local wineries. A Stoney Ridge Cabernet Franc, a Crown Bench Merlot Reserve and a rosé from Angel’s Gate are just a few names from a long, desirable list.
Niagara College’s Hospitality and Tourism Division offers diploma, certificate, and apprenticeship programs in the culinary management, hotel and restaurant management, and tourism development. The college also has a four-year bachelors degree in Hospitality Management.
Fred Bacher is a Canadian writer and filmmaker who received an M.A in Humanities (English and Media Study) from the University of Buffalo at New York and has received numerous awards for his work on both sides of the border.
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