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

[rfmcdonald]

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.