[PHOTO] The mural on the north side of the 519 Community Centre takes shape

[LINK] "The quest to fix Quebec’s wines"

Martin Patriquen of MacLean's had an interesting article describing the nascent Québec wine industry and its troubles.

In many ways, Quebec in 2013 is where Ontario was in the mid-’80s; strewn with disparate, stubborn winemakers eager to overcome their backwater reputation. Unlike Ontario, where winemakers benefited from promotion by the Grape Growers of Ontario wine association, Quebec has two winemaking associations that are completely at odds on how to move forward.

Grapes have grown in Quebec for centuries. When Jacques Cartier first saw Ile-d’Orléans in 1535, the mouth-shaped island in the St. Lawrence was overrun with native vitis riparia grapes. He called it Ile de Bacchus, even though the small blue grape was unsuited for wine. The province’s first winery, Côtes d’Ardoise (“slate hills”), opened in 1981 in Dunham, which sits in the valley between Sutton and Bromont mountains in the Eastern Townships. It did so illegally; the Quebec government had yet to devise a licence for residents to make alcohol, let alone sell it.

Then Charles-Henri de Coussergues, an agricultural exchange student from the Languedoc region of France, arrived in 1982. Languedoc was in the midst of a crisis because demand for its cheap table wine had collapsed; essentially, the French were becoming wine snobs. De Coussergues bought a 20-hectare dairy farm just down the road from Côtes d’Ardoise and began making and selling wine from the premises.

[. . .]

The trouble is Quebec’s 107 or so wineries can’t agree on how exactly to meet that challenge. It is a fundamentally divided industry, with the more established Association des Vignerons du Québec (AVQ) challenged by the upstart Vignerons Indépendants du Québec (VIQ), founded in 2006. Winemakers are a stubborn bunch, and there are many sticking points. But one of the main ones is certification and what varietals should and shouldn’t be part of it.

Standards are inconsistent. In 2007, an attempt to create a Canada-wide Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) stalled; Ontario and British Columbia wanted nothing to do with hybrid grapes­­—thought to be of lower quality­—and objected to the method many wineries used to harvest ice wine grapes. The AVQ has its own certification process, though only 22 wineries take part.

Then there’s the climate. Quebec is cold. Ontario and British Columbia less so. The crux of the argument is what, exactly, Quebec wine should be. People like Carone say Quebec will only be recognized as a true winemaking region when its wineries adopt the vitis vinifera grapes grown in Europe. The first commercial crop in Canada was planted in Ontario’s Niagara Region in 1978.

[LINK] "To be gay, Christian and black in Harlem"

Sarah Thomas' Al Jazeera America article describing African GLBT refugees who end up in New York City, in the historic black neighbourhood of Harlem, definitely caught my attention.

As a gay man in Togo, where homosexuality is punishable by up to three years in prison, Rodrigue (who asked that his last name be withheld because of concerns for his family’s safety) felt in danger. Though the law is rarely enforced, violence against gay men is perceived as a viable and available option among the general public. Rodrigue speaks of young men he has known who have been attacked by acquaintances on the street after school. He says that he was never physically threatened in Togo, then he reluctantly adds, “except by my family.”

“My uncle and aunt threatened to kill me, and it got really crazy.”

The turning point for Rodrigue was when his uncle physically attacked him and Rodrigue ran away. His uncle contacted the police, and from that point on, Rodrigue was effectively a wanted man.

Rodrigue moved to Harlem four years ago, when he was offered a U.N. fellowship. He moved into the International House near Columbia University and embraced his hopeful new life in New York. Though he was supposed to return to Togo four months later, he never went back.

He is part of a subcommunity of gay West African immigrants — a small fraction of the burgeoning West African population in Harlem, which has led to a stretch of 116th Street being called Little West Africa. Many LGBT West African immigrants fear persecution in their home countries and have sought asylum in the U.S.

“It was a pretty clandestine life,” he recalls. “I had to try to act ‘normal.’ Some people there are out, but it’s very rare. And dangerous.”

[LINK] "Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were"

Jonathan Mirsky's essay at The New York Review of Books makrs the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre that ended the Chinese protests. Despite extensive censorship, he argues that it's still quite relevant to modern China.

Twenty-five years ago to the day I write this, I watched and listened as thousands of Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square dared to condemn their leaders. Some shouted “Premier Li Peng resign.” Even braver ones cried “Down with Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party.” Before long, on the night of June 3–4, the People’s Liberation Army crashed into the square, rolling over the tents pitched there by industrial workers who had joined in the protests, and mowing down unarmed demonstrators. Until then, crowds in the square had walked wherever they pleased rather than standing on one of the numbered paving stones in that vast space. For decades, those who went there to see and hear national leaders were instructed to stand on a particular stone and shout prescribed slogans. But in May 1989, students and ordinary people were engaged in something the Communist Party has never been able to tolerate: zifade, “spontaneous” demonstrations.

That spontaneity spread from Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou. In Beijing, instead of the usual greeting between acquaintances, “Have you eaten yet?” people asked, “Have you demonstrated yet?” Police and soldiers had almost disappeared, and the staff of the Party’s newspapers appeared in the square holding high a banner bearing the words “We don’t want to lie anymore.” A few days before the killings, thousands of unarmed soldiers marched towards the square only to be scolded by elderly women and shamed into turning back. A column of tanks had been stalled on the edge of the city, where young men urinated on their treads while local women offered the crews cups of tea. In late May, I and several other journalists watched those tanks turn away, along with truckloads of soldiers, who had been blocked and rebuked in the suburbs before they, too, drove off. Now I really thought the Party was finished. How wrong we were—foreign reporters (I was a correspondent for The Observer in those days), China-watchers abroad, and many Chinese themselves. During a television interview in the square I said that, while I couldn’t predict, I was confident “China would never be the same again.” I wrote several opinion pieces for my paper saying much the same, surer about Chinese affairs than I had ever been.

On the night of the army’s entry into the center of Beijing I stood on one of the marble bridges under Mao’s portrait over the gate into the Forbidden City that faced onto the square. Shots sounded ever louder and as the army advanced under the dark red walls of the City a young man next to me shouted that the streaks in the darkness, even the sparks flashing off the stones, were “blanks.” Seconds later he slumped over the railing with a widening red circle on his t-shirt. No longer the China-expert, I turned to leave. My way was blocked by some Armed Police, who said, “You motherfucking foreign journalist,” knocked out five of my teeth, and fractured my left arm. Their officer was shooting people they had beaten to the ground and would have shot me if the Financial Times’s Robert Thompson had not bravely walked over and led me away.

The next morning, Sunday, June 4, I cycled back to the edge of the square just in time to see soldiers mow down parents of students who had come to look for those who had not returned home and who were feared to have been killed and their bodies burned. While I lay in the grass at the side of the avenue, doctors and nurses from the Peking Union Hospital (where my father had briefly worked in the early Thirties) arrived in an ambulance and in their bloodstained gowns went among the fallen; the soldiers shot them down, too. I managed to fly back to London later that day.