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.
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