Icewine Express
By Fred Bacher
Ware overcome by desperate desire to present ourselves as a natural, and completed experiment…It is as if we were Siamese twins, with one body, two heads and two separate but interrelated personalities. Together they are very interesting. But in some way most people want them separated or deny the importance of one from the other. They want us to be normalized. Banalized. We are unable to accept the remarkable originality of the Canadian experiment—its great strength—is its complexity.
—John Ralston Saul, Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century
NIAGARA
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The Riverbend Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, located in a central position on the Ontario Wine Route. and boasting an extensive list of Ontario wines. Foie gras and icewine are often paired here
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When does icewine begin? The time for it? My sense may differ from the winemakers around the village. In my own house, my four-year old son keeps the best barometer. By September’s first cold nip, my son requests readings from The Polar Express so he can prepare his imagination for winter nights. I’m sure Chris Van Allsberg’s book, combined with where I live—between the wine route and the Via Rail tracks—planted the seeds of my own train ride through winter.
I live by farmland where almost every symbol of Canada manages to make some kind of appearance. Near the maple syrup shack near Effingham, a flock of Canadian geese fly by; on the dirt road, a kid holds a hockey stick, while nearby a Via train starts north for Sudbury. There, it connects with the Polar Bear Express, a train that eventually goes as far north as Moosonee, on the tip of James Bay. Emblazoned on the engine car is the image of its most famous resident bear. Through the long litany of winters, we add now another typically Canadian image: icewine, a natural product, a reflection of Niagara and the country.
I listen as cold wind rustles my silent neighbors—these vineyards and their birds—while blasts are fired from silence, scaring birds from vines that are low with frozen grapes. Everything is frozen here, even the poetics. “My country is not a country it is winter,” writes poet George Bowering. For us, ice is the cold canvas of our country. Put a Canadian into any place that involves ice—they will have no choice but to play with it, make an art of it, even make a wine from it.
To begin, I took my boots around the most important place, the soil. I sampled icewines at Malevoire, Thirty Bench, Cave Spring Cellars, and Royal Demaria, the only vineyard that makes icewine exclusively. The Demaria, with its aluminum-looking vineyard shack, is like an icewine outpost for thirsty viticultural explorers. Its rough dirt road is navigable only by the locals, but posh new lamps by the road show future promise. As for Demaria’s recent offerings—these $5,000 bottles of icewine—they’ll soon be leaving the frozen tundra, on their way to Vegas sommeliers.
Meanwhile, back at the house, I’ve packed my bags with some old books and samples of icewine entrusted by excellent wineries—waiting for the right food and place for the wine.
At the St. Catharines station, less than an hour from Buffalo along the Wine Route near Jordan, I boarded a train bound north. I felt tiny blue pellets in my pockets, the dried blueberries from a culinary event the night before. I had used dried blueberries once for a sauce at home, starting with a cabernet franc icewine reduction, ending with a dark strawberry and spiced honey combination I served with some basil alongside the warmth of a Bosc pear. Great wintry stuff.
Great wintry stuff, icewine is, all around. First harvested in Niagara in the 1980s, icewine is, as John Raulston Saul describes Canada, “a natural as well as a completed experiment.” Also like Canada, its character is complex, a balance of sweetness and acidity.
The Niagara Icewine Festival January 14-23 (visit www.niagarawinefestival.com for complete details) features one hundred and twenty icewines from thirty-five wineries. The festival is in Niagara-on-the-Lake and Jordan, joint capitals of icewine and Siamese twins of sorts—one formal, governed by lines, the latter rustic and round.
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Ralston Saul, Canadian novelist and essayist
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I saw Toronto shimmer as the train came to a stop adjacent two stoic landmarks, Union Station and the Fairmont Royal York. I grabbed my bag and walked through Union Station, a centerpiece of the national railway, one of the “eight strategies” that Saul says made Canada’s historical progression. I walk past signs for “barber” and “coiffeur,” signs of our official pair of languages, Saul’s inseparable twins. Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century is one of the great philosophical and historical studies of Canada, the only country in the world where two language groups have got along this long.
From my suite on the seventeenth floor of the Royal York, I looked out at Union Station as a train headed north. I thought about Glenn Gould, our complex piano genius, who fled international concert stages for CBC radio, composing avant-garde compositions under the guise of “radio documentaries.”
Thinking of other Canadian eccentrics, I heard the Royal York was host for the new Marshall McLuhan Festival in October. Great idea. Where else can a McLuhan loyalist get a “Marvelous McLuhan Martini” served in a library bar? Toronto is increasingly a center of a cultural tourism with savvy nerve, not afraid of scholarly panache either.
Funny, thinking of McLuhan as a martini man. I wondered, if he were alive, what his line might be for icewine? Something like: “Icewine is the ultimate cool medium that expands the central nervous system’s ability to encounter the new digitized environment, like Plato’s Cave filled with a viable, organic current.” I turned off the lamp and counted trains northward, where they continued the journey, even as they vanished until morning.
OTTAWA
Northward again that afternoon, while looking out the frosted view from VIA #1 rolling to Ottawa, I was handed a hot towel and a glass of Jackson Triggs Meritage by the porter, gestures that left me convinced: nothing equals the train as transporter of the wine lover. Traveling first class, no hassles here.
If us grown-ups need a Santa Claus figure for the journey, let’s pick John Ralston Saul, one of our philosopher kings and Consort of the Governor General of Canada, who lives in our northerly capital. Saul has written that Canada is: “So complicated nobody knows how it works…” I don’t think anyone has ever exactly figured out how Santa and his people pull it off, either.
Saul, an internationally respected novelist and essayist, has influenced economic thought with his trilogy of books: Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion, and The Unconscious Civilization. He holds a Ph.D. in history from King’s College, University of London. His wife, Adrienne Clarkson, the Governor General, has a distinguished career as a broadcaster.
I’m reading Saul’s books on the train. As a way of summoning the cold déjà vu of the current esprit des corps, I am also reading The Trans Siberian Express by Blaise Cendrars. Though Cendrars was Swiss, my Canadian mood makes me turn to his astonishing prose poem, wherein the Kremlin appears to the disheveled young writer: “like an enormous cake encrusted with gold, with the great almonds of snow-white cathedrals, with its honey-golden bonnets.”
My Ottawa winter memories are similar: the Parliament buildings, skating on the frozen canal at night, sipping mulled wine with cinnamon sticks with friends.
I had breakfast at the Chateau with Executive Chef Marcel Mundel. Most chefs can’t wait to get away from writers. I try to get them to laugh about food, not always easy. But Mundel was gracious. I asked him, was there also mystery about hotel toast, that certain thin warmth in the butter’s texture? Mundel chuckled at the thought.
Mundel’s thoughts on icewine are emphatic. An icewine purist, he doesn’t like cooking with it, doesn’t like the economy of that. “To me, when you cook icewine, it ceases to be icewine anymore, “ he emphasizes. He also champions searing foie gras, seems to relish the risk.
That night I walked down long travertine stairs to dinner where I watched the orange sun on Parliament Hill disappear into the complexity of our democracy. I tried Henry of Pelham Baco Noir, a dark deep red that’s revived here from the Old World, with Chef Mundel’s signature dish: rack of Nunavut caribou with beet reduction. I finished with Pelletier icewine, not with seared foie gras, but with crème brule, that other volatile dessert endorsed for icewine. Then a surprise from the Gaelic-named waiter Garrick, serving me—yes—a cup of icewine tea, a bright and coppery infusion from Sri Lankan makers, with notes of Niagara’s white grape and fruit.
After dinner, I walked down to the Byward Market, searching for what Saul calls the “melancholy” of our poets and folksingers like Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn, and Stan Rogers. Easy for me—in my twenties, I once lived in the market, a melancholic writer myself. I drank with Stan Rogers, the blustery eastern bard, at the Chateau Lafayette where I lived. The Laff, as it’s known, was then a French-Canadian working class tavern and a hangout for civil servants and journalists. I was resident playwright and publicist at a theatre across the street. We did early versions in English of works by esteemed Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay.
Once we needed money very badly—a weekly occurrence in the theater biz. So we did a musical, Jacques Brel is Alive and Living in Paris. Under by-laws then, no posters were allowed in the market. My little stunt involved blasting Brel’s melancholic music from a window facing the market. Then I’d run to the market, always to the same spot, handing out Brel flyers.
So that night in the market, I stood the same spot again, gazing at the Laff’’s old neon sign, across from where the theater used to be. For us English Canadians, we may think in English, but sometimes we we sing in French. I stood there awhile, as if frozen in the snow. I couldn’t walk into the tavern for the sentimental visit I’d planned. A sad thing about melancholy, it’s a place I can no longer afford to visit, which is too bad— if my memory serves me correctly, the drinks were always cheap there.
I walked back in the snow to the Chateau. Falling asleep, I wondered if melancholy was something that can be missed. I think so, but so can trains, and so can the beauty of everything that ends with the journey.
Fred Bacher is a Canadian filmmaker and songwriter who has won numerous awards for his work in various media.
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