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.
