No more sour grapes. No more sneers from wine snobs who think they know better. The people have spoken, and the people love Fuzion.
Regular readers may be familiar with the little Argentine wine that could. I've mentioned the fruity red, which sells for $7.45 in Ontario, favourably on a couple of occasions. Mostly the e-mail response has been positive. But I've also detected jeers, including some from several wine-scribe colleagues who, at a recent trade tasting, accused me half-facetiously of being the “one to blame” for giving the Fuzion its first major shout-out in print upon its Ontario release last summer.
Well, I can now report that all Fuzion-bashers are officially wrong. In a sort of Pepsi Challenge for wine enthusiasts held last week in Toronto, Fuzion Shiraz Malbec 2008 placed first in the “New World-style” category among 24 red wines priced $10 or less. I'm talking blind tasting. Brown paper bags. No label snobbery or price prejudice.
I'll get to the details of the event and full list of top scorers in a second. But first let me update you on the seismic sales figures. Fuzion, which costs $8.15 in Quebec and just rolled out to British Columbia, at $8.99, and the three Prairie provinces, is by far the bestselling wine in Ontario, having shot to No. 1 soon after it was released.
That meteoric rise paralleled a similar trajectory in Quebec, where Fuzion was released 21/2 years ago and rapidly became No. 1 there.
Here's a more remarkable statistic: In terms of dollar sales, Fuzion Shiraz Malbec is now the No. 4 item at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, period. Historically, all the biggest revenue stars at the LCBO, as with all broad-based liquor retailers, have been big beer and spirit brands backed by lavish global ad campaigns. Currently, the top three in Ontario are Heineken (in the six-pack), Smirnoff vodka and Corona (also in the six-pack). Fuzion, with not a penny spent in advertising, just bumped Bacardi rum to No. 5.
I'd be flattered if it were all my doing.
But it's clear now the public would have come to Fuzion regardless of what any critic wrote.
Last week's public event, dubbed “Recession Reds” and held at Grano restaurant on Yonge Street, was adjudicated by about 120 people. With the exception of five or six professional critics who were there mostly to observe, all were “ordinary” wine lovers, and I use the term flatteringly. It was as though Grano had set up a coat check for wine pretense at the door.
Some were modest wine collectors, but most simply were regular wine consumers interested in deep value. All were fans of Ontario's great bargain-wine tracker and author Billy Munnelly of BillysBestBottles.com, who organized the event to explore the proposition, “Can you have a great wine life for $10?”
Mr. Munnelly had carefully selected the wines from his own bestselling value guide, Billy's Best Bottles 2009 , so there were no major duds or industrial jug-style wines in the base list.
I played no official role in the evening except to sip, soak up the joyous atmosphere and, like 120 others, inhale Grano's fittingly proletarian recession entrée of pasta and meatballs, a dish that should have been dubbed Houdini Linguine; if you want to see hearty food disappear, serve it to a crowd that's just sipped 25 glasses of dry red wine on an empty stomach.
Fuzion Shiraz Malbec 2008 not only was the resounding winner in the New World (or non-European) wine-style category, it also came in at the lower end of the price range.
Here's another Fuzion scoop. I recently sampled a white version from producer Familia Zuccardi that is on its way to Ontario later this spring. In my humble opinion, it's better than the red. Stay tuned for details.
