Campaign to introduce a VQA Canada resurrected
Donald Ziraldo, the NOTL co-founder of Inniskillin Winery, is back on the trail of putting together a national standard for Canadian wines — a VQA Canada.
The idea is to ensure consumers know exactly what they are getting when buying Canadian wine, both at home and abroad, and to also help get over the barriers of interprovincial trade.
Those barriers are currently prohibiting Niagara grapes from reaching British Columbia wineries — wineries suffering a grape shortage this year thanks to a disastrously cold winter in that province.
“The reason that we're doing VQA Canada is rather than just telling our friends in B.C. that we want to help, but to get this right across retail,” he added.
“I've spoken to the LCBO about it, both the chairman and the CEO and they're supportive,” he added.
Ziraldo first threw out the idea of a national standard in the early 1990s, not long after helping create VQA Ontario and VQA B.C.
It’s been on his agenda ever since.
“I want to finish what I started,” he said.
Currently, if you go into any LCBO location to find local wines, the aisle for those wines from this province simply reads "Ontario," Ziraldo said.
This doesn’t mean their ingredients are 100% from Ontario: many Ontario bottles contain imported wines, a practice Ziraldo noted is perfectly legal. With alcohol sales now available in grocery and corner stores in Ontario, the retail opportunities for VQA wines has exponentially increased.
What Ziraldo wants to see is a legislated system that would allow retailers to tell the consumer the wine they are buying is 100 per cent Canadian. He resurrected the crusade that started in the '90s in June this year by calling together a meeting with himself, members of the federal government, including Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacCauley and Dan Paszkowski, president and CEO of Wine Growers Canada.
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He has asked Vancouver member of parliament Joyce Murray, also at the June meeting, to bring the issue in front of government during its next sitting, which began Monday, Sept. 16.
“I thought it'd be appropriate to have a B.C. person, as opposed to an Ontario person, table a motion in Parliament,” said Ziraldo, hoping the move will paint a better picture of B.C.’s need for Ontario grapes.
He didn’t stop there.
“I've also spoken to the chairman of the standing committee in agriculture that is going to investigate this whole thing,” he said, “because you have to put standards together underneath all of these appellations, and then you gotta figure out how to fix the interprovincial barrier.”
The big picture of the VQA Canada quest would be an allowance to partner with provinces such as B.C., Quebec and Nova Scotia to ensure national cooperation amongst grape growers, but to also create an identifiable national appellation to enhance Canada's global wine-making savvy, like the Appellation d'origine contrôlée in France and the Denominazione di origine controllata in Italy.
“Everyone knows wines from Italy and France,” said Ziraldo. “Not many people know Canada makes wine.”
