Covering Niagara: Studies in Local Popular Culture

Niagara's Emerging Wine Culture: From a Countryside of Production to Consumption

NIAGARA’S EMERGING WINE CULTURE From a Countryside of Production to Consumption HUGH GAYLER INTRODUCTION Niagara has played a pivotal role in the development of a wine culture in Canada. This was where it all began in the late nineteenth century, and today it is the largest grape-growing and wine-producing area in the country with over ninety estate and boutique wineries. However, talk of a wine culture is surprisingly recent and follows a century of bad Canadian wine, a Prohibition -era mentality, the heavy hand of government, which hardly promoted the industry, and a tradition that favoured beer, spirits, and imported wines over the local product. It was not until the 1970s that all this changed. The growing of different grape varieties, the development of estate and boutique wineries, a new level of entrepreneurship, and the promotion of a very different wine industry have resulted in a dramatic shift in how a growing middle class of consumers views Canadian wines. This study examines Canada’s early wine industry and why the industry in the last thirty years has seen a new, and very different, course of action for Canadian wine and a wine culture. It has led to Niagara becoming an important agritourism destination; it is associated with various middle-class lifestyle experiences here and elsewhere; and it was in part responsible for persuading the Ontario government in 2005 to legislate a greenbelt in the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area, thereby protecting Niagara’s vineyards from urban development in perpetuity. However, behind the bucolic landscapes and in spite of media hype and middle-class consumerism, considerable challenges face this industry. Production is relatively small and its influence is more 195 196 Food and Drink local than global; the heavy hand of government still casts a shadow over entrepreneurial spirit; and the big international players exert an influence that is so often resented by the little guy. Also, a certain irony remains: there is no doubt that in the hyping of the product, wine is becoming part of popular culture, but it is all too readily seen as a middle-class preoccupation and a learning experience for most Canadians. EVOLUTION OF THE LOCAL WINE INDUSTRY For the first hundred years of settlement in Niagara, following the American War of Independence, there was no commercial wine industry. Mixed agriculture met the needs of new immigrants. As transportation improvements took place, in particular the coming of the railway, many agricultural products could be more cheaply imported from elsewhere, and Niagara farmers had to seek different crops to give them a competitive advantage (Chapman 1994). The northern part of the Niagara Peninsula, to the north of the Niagara Escarpment, extending from the City of Hamilton to the Niagara River, constitutes one of Canada’s most favourable climatic regions and has microclimate and soil conditions that are highly conducive to the growing of tender fruit and grape crops (Shaw 1994, 2005, Planscape 2003). Coined the Niagara Fruit Belt, the area’s peach and cherry orchards, for example, became unparalleled in Canada, and the new and faster rail communications allowed for fresh fruit to be exported to the growing urban markets in Ontario and Quebec. Niagara’s vineyards and the resulting wine story did not exactly curry the same favour (Rannie 1978, Bramble 2009). Wine experts, or indeed any discerning consumer of wine, did not consider the various local grape varieties , collectively known as Vitis labrusca, to make particularly good wine. Indeed, it was far from good, with the grapes best left to the juice and jam industries and the making of fortified wines such as port and sherry. Jokes abounded about cheap and fast ways to get drunk or help strip paint. There was never any sentiment about a European-style wine culture, and parallels were not even drawn with the emerging wine cultures in places such as California , South Africa, and Australia. It was strictly an industrial product associated with wineries that were located in urban areas alongside any other factory. The name of the grape mattered little compared to the name of the company—for example, Jordan Wines, Barnes Wines, and Bright’s—and it was all too often simply red wine or white wine, unromantically delivered for cheapness in metal-capped gallon jugs. For almost 100 years, it was an industry going nowhere. Canada remained firmly a beer and spirit nation, and the overwhelmingly European émigré population who wanted...