News

Feel like a beverage with bold character for dinner tonight? How about a racy glass of Contrarian Sauvignon Blanc. Or a sip of My Way Chardonnay. Or, assuming the impressionable young children have been put to bed, an aromatic SonOfaBitch Pinot Noir?

That last one is not a profanity. It's a trademarked brand name approved by the esteemed Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Seriously.

All three are part of a daring new wine line called Megalomaniac, which could give the bestselling Fat Bastard a kick in the pants, so to speak.

If you're familiar with wine marketing, you may have guessed that the line is from Australia, land of critter labels like Crocodile Chase, or California, which gave us Cardinal Zin, or Southern France, home to the aforementioned Bastard.

Wrong on all counts. It's the latest wine venture from Niagara, specifically from a new company called John Howard Cellars of Distinction, whose namesake - the so-called megalomaniac behind the name - once owned the respected Vineland Estates Winery.

It also may just mark a turning point in the evolution of Niagara's hyperconservative wine industry. The implicit message: We're finally mature and confident enough not to take ourselves so seriously. At least that's Mr. Howard's megalomaniacal hope.

Few people besides Mr. Howard, in fact, would have had the combination of hustle and local stature to venture forth with such a bold concept. Having made a tidy sum in the office-products business, the long-time Niagara resident bought Vineland Estates in 1993, boosting annual production from 4,000 cases to 75,000 before deciding to sell out in 2004.

Intending to retire, he nonetheless kept 110 of the estate's 350 acres and, encouraged by his "fishing buddies," decided last year to re-enter the business. Only this time, the 58-year-old says, comfortable semi-retirement has afforded him a new perspective.

His goal is to limit annual production to a few thousand cases of handcrafted wine while keeping the bottle price below $25 for all but the icewine (in part to "send a message" to makers of pricier wines in Niagara, he says) and injecting some fun into the industry.

"I want a universality to the acceptance of these wines," says Mr. Howard, who hired Vineland veteran Andrzej Lipinski as his winemaker and second-generation grower Duarte Oliveira as his vineyard manager. "I don't want them to be for just the Jaguar-and-diamond crowd."

It is, I dare say, an audacious strategy, given the growing number of $40-plus Niagara wines on the market that are borrowing the château-style imagery and pretentious terminology of centuries-old European estates.

"We're not the Old World," Mr. Howard says. "I don't know of any châteaux here. Do you? I know Château Montebello, but it's made out of logs," he adds, referring to the 1930s-era cedar-frame Quebec resort that played host to the 1981 International Economic Summit.

Mr. Howard's silent partner in the concept is Bernie Hadley-Beauregard, founder and principal of Brandever Strategy Inc., the Vancouver-based design firm known for its award-winning, and revenue-energizing, makeovers of numerous B.C. properties including Blasted Church, Laughing Stock and Dirty Laundry.

Mr. Hadley-Beauregard says he came up with the concept, his first in Niagara, last year while being whisked around the peninsula for three days by Mr. Howard - who, he says, kept repeating the phrase "I'm not a megalomaniac or anything, but ..."

"I said to him, 'I will give you two more chances, but if you say it a third time that's going to be the name of your winery,' " Mr. Hadley-Beauregard recalls.

Each label in Megalomaniac's series depicts a faceless figure of a male executive wearing a bowler hat and suit (in the case of the icewine, a coat). But there's a different embellishment to each one.

Mr. Howard says the Contrarian Sauvignon Blanc is an homage to one of his fishing friends, regarded as a contrarian businessman. The Vainglorious Cabernet Merlot is a subtle reference to the vaunted status of cabernet sauvignon and merlot in the grape-world pecking order. Similarly, SOB is a reference to the frustrating challenge of producing a quality red wine from pinot noir, a thin-skinned and notoriously temperamental grape.

"It's so true to the grape varietal that I couldn't believe it wasn't out there, that it wasn't trademarked," says Mr. Hadley-Beauregard of SOB, which he is quick to point out is a legitimate expression defined in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Others in the series include: Pink Slip Rosé, an easy-drinking $14.95 blush wine made from pinot noir grapes rejected as unfit for the $24.95 SOB; Coldhearted Cabernet Franc Icewine, pressed from frozen grapes; and Narcissist Riesling, a wine-industry in-joke of sorts that alludes to the white grape's exceptional ability to reflect nuances peculiar to each soil - as though it were a mirror of the land. To help drive home the conceit, the words "narcissist riesling" are printed backwards, inviting consumers to hold the bottle up to a mirror and, in turn, view their own reflections.

Some of us may find that last one a bit of a reach. But it's already helped the Megalomaniac brand score serious critical praise. Two weeks ago, Brandever captured best-of-show design honours for the series at the San Francisco International Wine Competition, against a field of about 1,200 entries.

Narcissist Riesling was singled out as the only individual design to earn double-gold honours, meaning every judge rated it his or her top pick.

This week, the brand also just took home an award at the 2007 Applied Arts Design & Advertising Awards, Canada's authoritative competition for good design.

While I hear there have been mutterings about the brand's potential to undermine Niagara's self-importance as a wine region, the on-the-record response seems positive. Available only through private order since June 10, the 2,400-case production is almost half sold. (Visit megalomaniacwine.com or call 1-888-megalo1 for more information.)

"It's winning over a lot of people here in the restaurant," says James Treadwell of Treadwell, a prominent wine-country restaurant in Port Dalhousie, Ont., that carries four of the wines.

Mr. Treadwell says the conspicuous-sounding names are a big plus on top of what he considers to be excellent value for money. "This is the first case that I've come across in this area where it's not based on the family or the estate idea, but on just having fun."

It won't be the last.

Mr. Hadley-Beauregard is working on three more convention-busting projects in the region, including a soon-to-be-launched brand makeover for the Niagara College Teaching Winery, which sells a variety of wines to the public.

The new label features a cartoon montage of idyllic campus life, with students shuffling along with their iPods, riding Vespas and sipping wine in their dorm-room windows.

It's a dazzling contrast to the existing label, which is dominated by the initials "NCT" and has no graphical elements to speak of.

Another project, almost certain to be a sensation, is based on the true story of a feud between two Mennonite parishes in the region that ended in the 1930s with members of one group robbing the other's pipe organ and dumping it in a river. Mr. Hadley-Beauregard's proposed name for the new winery: Organized Crime.

He cautions that that proposal could die on the drafting table if it gets a thumbs-down from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which can decline retail space to labels it deems offensive.

Let's hope the board sees merit in the concept. Squelching an inventive label design may be the bigger crime.

bcrosariol@globeandmail.com