Michael Pinkus has a couple of anecdotes about the marketing sleight-of-hand that allows certain Canadian wineries to sell foreign-sourced wines as if they were Canadian:

Picture, if you will, a classroom of about 30 adult students. Teacher stands up at the front and writes the words “Cellared in Canada” on the blackboard, he then asks, “Who has heard this term?” Head nods of agreement, they have heard of this. The teacher then writes these three letters “V-Q-A” on the board, “Who’s heard this term?” he asks. Everyone again nods accession. “What’s the difference?” Silence ensues. There are then some attempts to explain the difference, but there always seems to be a little confusion in the definition. The words, “no, but thanks for playing,” escaped my lips on more than one occasion. Yes I was that teacher and this happened less than 2 weeks ago. With all the media hype surrounding Cellared in Canada the only thing anyone knows for sure is that somehow cellared wines are bad; but VQA, has somehow been lumped in there too, the term has gotten lost in all the hype. Truth is, these two terms should be as clear as night and day to Ontario wine drinkers.

Now picture this. A man driving down the road, his cell phone rings, he answers, pleasantries are exchanged, then the question is posed, “What’s up?” The person on the other end of the phone is a winery owner with a very real concern, “We’re getting hammered here by irate customers telling us that they are disappointed with us and angry about being duped over our use of foreign grapes and off shore wines.” He pauses for dramatic effect, “We don’t make cellared wines, we’re strictly VQA, always have been always will be. Mike is there anything you can do?” Oh how I wish I could. My worst fears are now being realized; all Ontario wine is being painted with the sloppy broad-brush strokes of Cellared in Canada.

The two stories above are true and have come about due to the continuing controversy surrounding Cellared in Canada wine. Let’s be crystal clear about these two products: Cellared in Canada and VQA. Cellared in Canada is the foreign blend with 30% Ontario content (0% in B.C.); it is a bastard child with no home, an orphan with no earthly parentage. VQA, on the other hand is a purebred, it is 100% from the province it states, Ontario or B.C., currently the only 2 provinces with VQA regulations in place. A VQA wine has the flavour of its origin, it has a home, it has that aspect of “Terroir” the French so rightly hype. Terroir means soil, but it means more than that when talking about wine, it’s a combination, a culmination if you will, of everything mother nature brings to the table in any given year that goes into making that wine — the soil, the climate, the environment. VQA is Ontario wine — 100% — always has been, always will be — if it says VQA, it’s A-OK.

Michael Pinkus doesn’t pull punches as he reports on some of the big names in the Ontario wine arena:

As you can see, the Cellared in Canada problem has not waned one little bit, in fact, this summer I watched the debate intensify. I even saw the train wreck known as Hillary Dawson, president of the Wine Council of Ontario, defend the practice as “[allowing] Ontario growers and winemakers to compete with low-priced foreign wines”. I really do wonder about this woman sometimes, she says some pretty asinine things and you’d better believe I’m keeping her press clipping cause you can always count on at least one, juicy piece of inanity. The more she opens her mouth, the further she sticks her foot into it. Many have wondered out loud whether she is just a lackey (or mouthpiece) for the larger wineries, those that currently make Cellared product. Hillary, if I could have given you any advice this summer, it would have been to take a vacation, put away the pens, don’t write another word to a newspaper and for God’s sake don’t give another interview. If the topic of Cellared wine comes up, run the other way. Her vacation mate should be my favourite whipping boy Bruce Walker of Vincor. He was at it again, blaming the lack of a winery home for grapes, both this year and last on the growers (“I would suggest less grapes be grown in Canada …”) and not on the thousands of litres his company brings in to make Cellared in Canada CRAP (Cheap Readily Available Plonk).

I also found myself embroiled in the Buckhorn debate , as organizers try to figure out the direction of the festival for next year. Something tells me I’ve probably given my last seminar at Buckhorn, unless they want me to talk about VQA. They should talk to the Shores of Erie organizers about that one. But hopefully, finding their focus will make the festival better in the long run.

Here’s an earlier post on the whole wretched Cellared in Canada mess.

Konrad Ejbich has an article in the most recent issue of Wine Spectator discussing the business and legal side of allowing large Canadian wineries to import grape juice and sell the result as “Canadian” wine:

It’s a longstanding quirk of Canadian wine law: “Cellared in Canada.” Several Canadian provinces allow wineries to import bulk wine (the popular choices today are Argentina and Chile), bottle it and call it Canadian, as long as the back label contains those three magic words. In the country’s two biggest wine regions, Ontario law requires such wines to contain 30 percent local grapes while British Columbia law requires no Canadian grapes.

But Ontario’s growing boutique wine industry is now calling for an end to “cellared” wines, arguing that the time has come for Canadian to mean Canadian. They claim the practice is tarnishing the reputation of local wine and jeopardizing the livelihood of grapegrowers. They charge that big wine companies are importing bulk wine and marketing it as “Canadian,” while domestic grapegrowers leave thousands of tons of fruit to rot on the vine.

“When we have wineries literally driving past vineyards full of Ontario grapes to pick up imported grape juice to make a blend, it is clear there is an issue,” said Jim Warren, president of the Ontario Viniculture Association. Growers and small wineries are organizing protests outside wine stores and have called for a boycott. They’ve asked the Ontario government to enact clearer labeling of “Cellared in Canada” products, increase the percentage of Ontario grapes used in blended wines and significantly increase the availability of VQA wines in Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) stores. (VQA, or Vintners’ Quality Alliance, is the appellation and quality organization that guarantees the authenticity of domestically-grown wines in Canada.)

Historical note from the old site: in a 2006 post, the name “Conrad Edgebeck” appeared in the comments. That was someone’s attempt to render Konrad Ejbich’s name from hearing it spoken on the radio. That particular post drew slow but steady Google hits showing that there were lots of others who clearly knew who Konrad was, but had no idea how to spell his name. Having now re-referenced the approximate pronunciation, I expect this post will serve the same function for this site.

Update, 9 February, 2012: Just as I suspected, this post is still showing up frequently in the search logs (161 times in the last week). To save you a bit of further work, here’s the top Google entry on Konrad — http://winewriterscircle.ca/members/ejbich-konrad and here is his Twitter feed — https://twitter.com/#!/winezone. Just trying to help.