As I mentioned a few weeks ago, British wine writer Jancis Robinson was in Toronto in December to launch the new edition of her wine atlas. Ms Robinson is perhaps the most celebrated British wine writer and her
Oxford Companion to Wine is a must-have for every serious student of wine.
While she was in Toronto, she did a tasting of about 70 Canadian wines, selected by Janet Dorozynski, wine co-ordinator at Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and Zoltan Szabo, a Toronto-based sommelier and wine consultant.
Ms. Robinson wrote up her reviews on her website (the paid-access section of it, unfortunately) and wrote on Canadian wine in her influential column in London's Financial Times. Both probably evoked ambiguous reactions in the Canadian wine industry, depending on how the comments and reviews were read.
On the one hand, you can note her comment that "Canada is producing world-class wines." In fact, she said, "I tasted about 70 wines in all, 17 of which I felt were world-class wines from any point of view."
Now, that's one in four of the wines she tasted, and that's not a bad percentage to be considered world-class.
But these comments were buried in a mass of unconnected observations about such things as the ethnicity of the names of the people involved in organizing her tasting in Toronto and whether the LCBO is the world's largest single buyer of wine (as is often claimed).
She also laid into the Canadian wine industry for not clearly enough labelling blends of foreign and Canadian wines, and into the LCBO for mixing these blended wines and VQA wines on their shelves. She's absolutely right on both these counts, of course, although I'd have thought her British readership might have been more interested in knowing more about Canadian wine than about some of the retail challenges we face domestically.
Still, it's important to have Jancis Robinson recognize Canadian wines as world-class. Some of the wines, it must be said, were included for educational purposes, rather than because they were thought to be stellar examples of a style or variety.
It's not the first time Ms. Robinson has praised Canadian wines. I went to dinner at her place in southern France in 2000 and took two bottles of Niagara Peninsula wine: Cave Spring CSV Chardonnay 1998 and Henry of Pelham Cabernet Merlot Reserve 1998. We drank the Chardonnay (she was very complimentary about it), but she kept the Cab Merlot to serve blind to some visiting winemakers the following week. She later e-mailed me to say they had identified it as a very good Bordeaux, probably a well-known Chateau.
This time around, Ms. Robinson picked out 10 wines as worthy of particular mention, five from Ontario and five from British Columbia. But I gather not everyone in the Canadian wine industry is thrilled with her reviews and the article.
The thing is, you take your chances with the media. Overall, I'd say this was a chance well taken as it has brought Canadian wine to the attention of an important segment of the British wine-buying public. And what they're most likely to remember is that Jancis Robinson wrote that Canada produces some world-class wines.
Four wines today, all quite different so that you can try them all this weekend.