"They make wine in Brazil?"
You get puzzled reactions upon mentioning you've just been to a Brazilian wine tasting. Yes, Brazilian wine - it's not just a Chilean vintner's idea of a punchline any more.
Despite the country's well-earned reputation as a beach-volleyball playground and tropical rainforest, Brazil is home to large swaths of rich, well-drained soil and grape-friendly microclimates.
Mercifully, those swaths tend to feature undulating hills and steep slopes, making them more or less invulnerable to one of the biggest threats to arable land in the country, tens of millions of soccer-crazed kids pursuing their World Cup dreams on dirt fields.
Tucked down in the country's extreme south, well below the equatorial jungle and dental-floss-bikini beaches of Rio de Janeiro, five distinct appellations have recently been churning out impressively polished, modern-styled wines.
Having replanted many rot-gut varieties with elegant French grapes such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir and chardonnay, Brazilian producers are trying to step out of the long shadow cast by their South American neighbours, Argentina and Chile.
For the past few years, a trickle of Brazilian offerings has been available in Quebec.
And during a visit and tasting in Toronto last Friday by several Brazilian winemakers, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario placed its first order for two wines from Miolo Wine Group. The wines, to be released next year, are a cabernet sauvignon for $16.95 and a pinot noir for $15.45.
With a winning combination of mouth-cleansing acidity and ripe, soft fruit flavour, Brazilian wines represent a stylistic middle ground between the bracing, earthy wines of Europe and the orchard blasts of the New World.
Many reds I sampled at last Friday's trade tasting called to mind a good Niagara or New Zealand merlot from a warm year.
Finer producers include Miolo, Casa Valduga, Boscato and Pizzato. And the best part: Prices tend to range between $12 and $25 for pretty decent juice, though a few brands seemed to be testing their luck.
One very good producer, Don Laurindo, is charging $104.99 (U.S.) south of the border for its Gran Reserva blend of tannat, the obscure grape used to make lowly Madiran in southern France, and a rare Italian variety called ancilota. I think I'd be safe in betting that this is the most expensive tannat-ancilota blend ever produced.
Brazil's low profile is understandable. Producers began exporting in earnest only in 2002 in the proud wake of the country's fifth World Cup victory. Leading producers pooled their marketing budgets to form an export lobby called Wines From Brazil mainly to target Europe, the United States, Russia and Japan.
Brazil's 900 wineries - 700 in the cool southern region - yield 3.5 million hectolitres a year, making it the fifth-largest producer in the southern hemisphere, behind Argentina, Australia, Chile and South Africa. Smaller producers include Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru and New Zealand.
That may sound less than impressive, given its colonial tie to wine-soaked Portugal. But it's notable when you consider domestic per-capita wine consumption in the sweltering country amounts to less than two litres a year, well behind Canada, at 13.9 litres in 2006.
"Brazil is a warm country," Andreia Gentilini Milan, export manager for Wines From Brazil, told me. "The Italian immigrants went to the south of Brazil. So, basically, the wine consumption in Brazil is Sao Paulo and down."
Beer is the more popular refresher, as is cachaca, the rum-like spirit made from fermented sugar cane juice, guzzled at an annual rate of about 12 litres per person. But wine is growing at about 10 per cent a year.
Even at a low consumption rate, Brazil is able to support a sizable domestic wine industry thanks to a population of 187 million, the world's fifth-largest.
Serious grape cultivation effectively began around 1875, when a wave of Italian immigrants began taking advantage of the country's open-door policy toward Europeans, enacted to address a labour shortage caused by a jubilant event, the abolition of slavery.
By far the biggest wave came from Italy's northern Veneto region and, incidentally, included one of my great uncles, who was forced to change his name to Crozariol with a "z" because the immigration office thought it sounded more Portuguese. Rather than establishing a branch of the family wine trade, his descendants succeeded with a Sao Paulo food company that still bears the family name.
There are about 25 million people of Italian descent in Brazil, the biggest community in the Italian diaspora. And while most are a century or more removed from the motherland, Italo-Brazilians are as fiercely proud of their heritage as any fresh-off-the-boat Italian-Canadian. So much so, in fact, that many descendants of 19th-century immigrants can speak not just Italian, but also the quaint Venetian dialect of their distant ancestors.
That is how I conversed last Friday with Flavio Pizzato, the young owner-director of Pizzato Vinhas & Vinhos, at the Wines From Brazil tasting at the Westin Harbour Castle. "Brazilian wines have acidity and should be served slightly cool," he said, complaining of the high heat in the room.
It wasn't until the 1970s that producers started to emphasize quality over quantity, led by multinationals such as Moet & Chandon and Pernod Ricard, which began to invest in the country mainly to source inexpensive still wine to carbonate and turn into ersatz champagne as an alternative to beer for the South American market.
Those companies prodded the locals to scout out better vineyard sites, most of which now are located at high, grape-friendly elevations and at about the same latitude as the best wine regions of Chile and Argentina.
The one exception is Brazil's youngest and most promising wine region, Vale do Sao Francisco, a fascinating anomaly in the world of grape cultivation.
It is situated in the high north, at an equator-grazing latitude of just 10 degrees, well short of the cool 30-to-50-degree band considered vital for wine farming in both hemispheres. Sub-tropical and extremely dry, the valley is remarkable for another feature: It can produce up to three crops a year, a wine producer's dream come true.
They make wine in Brazil? Yes, every four months, actually.
***
Swirls from Ipanema
Brazilian wines will start to trickle into parts of Canada next year. Here is a sample of what we might expect.
MIOLO QUINTA DO SEIVAL CASTAS PORTUGUESAS 2004
(available in Quebec, $21.25)
A blend of traditional Portuguese varieties touriga nacional, tinta roriz and alfrocheiro, it's full-bodied with notes of fig, dark berries, chocolate and roasted meat. Very good.
CASA VALDUGA DUETTO CABERNET SAUVIGNON MERLOT 2004 (estimated price $15)
Full-bodied, luscious. Flavours
of plum, dark chocolate and fresh herbs encased in fine tannins.
DON LAURINDO MERLOT RESERVA 2005
(estimated price $38)
Smooth, ripe, clean and deliciously balanced, with nuances
of chocolate and leather.
PIZZATO FAUSTO MERLOT ROSE 2007 (estimated price $12)
Excellent. Dry, ripe and strawberry-like with silky texture and elegant balance. A serious bargain.
Beppi Crosariol