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Complete this sentence: You'll know Canadian wine has arrived when ...
Many of you, of course, believe Canadian wine has arrived. Certainly, the milestones are there. They began in earnest with Inniskillin's French coup in 1991, taking home the Citadelles d'Or Grands Prix d'Honneur for a 1989 Niagara icewine.
They continued a few years later with Mission Hill's victory for best chardonnay in the world at the International Wine and Spirit Competition. Most recently, there was last year's shocker at the same IWSC annual competition, when Jackson-Triggs Okanagan Estate scored the Rosemount Estate trophy for best shiraz/syrah in the world, humiliating far more expensive reds from the shiraz bastion of Australia.
Here's my heartfelt answer: You'll know Canadian wine has fully come of age when prominent restaurants across the country feature all-Canadian wine lists. While we're not there yet, the signs are promising. Are you ready for the 100-mile cellar?
The all-Canadian club so far includes such forward-thinking, casual establishments as Allen's in Toronto, Fusion Grill in Winnipeg, and Aurora and Pair bistros in Vancouver.
(Yes, Winnipeg and Vancouver are more than 100 miles from the Okanagan or Niagara, but I like the spirit captured in the "100-mile diet" label so in vogue these days.)
The latest, and I would argue most significant, experiment with an all-domestic list has been taking place at Feenie's in Vancouver, the upscale Kitsilano bistro adjacent to Lumière, acclaimed chef Rob Feenie's and owner-partner David Sidoo's temple to West Coast dining.
I use the word "experiment" because the manager of Feenie's, Rob Kent, took the brave step of introducing an all-B.C. wine list this year but was forced to capitulate slightly in recent weeks because some of his regulars were not shy about putting their mouths where there money was.
They wanted big-bodied California chardonnays and Australian shirazes or else.
"They were the most vociferous ones, at the end of the day, in making it clear that we didn't have the wines they wanted," Mr. Kent said.
To his credit, Mr. Kent added only a couple of token foreign wines to pacify the pinstripes, preserving the core of his B.C. selections.
The 50-selection list is still dominated by superb, hard-to-get labels from domestic producers both big and small, such as Nichol Pinot Gris from the Okanagan Valley and Orofino Pinot Noir from Similkameen.
The neat thing is that Mr. Kent isn't a West Coast native who might have been prone to an exaggerated sense of British Columbia's place in the wine world.
He's from Ontario and has been a sommelier and manager at many fine Toronto establishments that sell lots of European wine. In short, he knows his global juice.
"You can put together a list of 50 wines for a restaurant of this level only from B.C. and not be sacrificing anything," he said.
The wines on his list range from the delicate Tantalus Old Vines Riesling and high-toned, aromatic wonder of Black Widow Gewurztraminer to such heavy-hitter reds as Pentage and Poplar Grove Cabernet Franc.
Like chefs who become missionaries for local ingredients, Mr. Kent is most enthusiastic when open-minded customers put their trust in his knowledge.
"If you don't have anything but B.C. wines, and they're great B.C. wines, people will be exposed to something wonderful instead of what they're used to."
He adds that the province boasts the equivalent of garagiste wine producers, the famous "garage-sized" upstarts of Bordeaux that have ignited a quality revolution with their tiny-production, handcrafted gems.
"Most of the public never gets to see it in stores, and it certainly never leaves B.C., but it does come to the restaurants. These wines - they show real terroir."
That French word, a reference to the local soil and climate conditions reflected in the wine, is the driving force - besides blatant nationalism, of course - behind the growing number of strongly Canadian wine lists.
In Europe, it's not uncommon for a local bistro to feature wines only from the surrounding region. In fact, ordering a Burgundy in Bordeaux can be, to use another handy French term, gauche. In many cases the cuisine, not coincidentally, has been crafted to flatter the local wines, and vice versa.
"We use a lot of local ingredients and we're trying to generate a real cuisine, where the wine and food come from the same place," said Jeff Van Geest, owner of Aurora Bistro, which introduced its pioneering all-B.C. list four and a half years ago, when the restaurant opened. "Maybe that's romanticizing it, but I think there's something to it."
For John Maxwell, proprietor of Allen's, that romantic notion took root back in 1987 when he opened his avant-garde (at the time) gastropub on Danforth Avenue with a mostly Canadian wine list. In 2001, he dropped all foreign wines and converted to VQA - or quality controlled - Canadian wines.
To be fair, patrons sometimes complain. "People do still want wines from other regions, but most now know what we are about and either get with the program, go somewhere else or drink one of our 140 beers or 350 whiskies," he said. Of Allen's approximately 80 wines, four currently hail from British Columbia.
Mr. Maxwell says he became convinced back in the late-1980s that his fellow restaurateurs were being slow to recognize the "excellence" of domestic wines and was "proud to offer, in a sea of relatively bland and anonymous verdicchio, pinot grigio, Yellow Tail and Santa-whomever, only what I call 'our wines.' " It also fit with the restaurant's policy of sourcing Ontario food ingredients whenever possible.
For now, it's mostly bistros that have jumped on the 100-mile-cellar concept. Nor do I think we'll see a surge of white-tablecloth establishments following the lead of bistros such as Allen's, Aurora and Feenie's or Toronto pubs such as the Rebel House and Cafe Volo.
Not only do higher-priced establishments have to cater to big spenders with a palate for foreign wines, they also tend to run on higher overheads and rely heavily on huge markups on those expensive Bordeaux and California cabernets.
"If you're marking up a $200 wine by 100 per cent, that's a $200 markup," said Aurora's Mr. Van Geest. "There's not even a $100 B.C. wine right now, retail. ... You look at other restaurants and if they sell a few huge wines in a night, that makes for a really big night. I don't have the opportunity to do that."
But now, as with the 100-mile diet, there is a new imperative justifying the local-sourcing trend: the environment.
Wine and water - relatively dense and heavy cargo, especially when thick glass bottles are involved - are a greenhouse-gas scourge.
Carbon emissions associated with shipping beverages around the world contribute to the problem. Our growing taste for wines from far-off countries is, to paraphrase Al Gore, an inconvenient thirst.
Curiously, many high-end chefs have taken up the cause of promoting sustainable seafood sources and eschewing endangered species such as bluefin tuna and Chilean sea bass.
It's the right thing to do for the planet, they argue. Well, maybe not so right when their virtuously farmed local rainbow trout gets paired with a sauvignon blanc that was shipped thousands of kilometres from Western Australia.
