Wine producers in Prince Edward County did an interesting thing a couple of weeks ago: they opened a wine store.
How could they do that, in a province where private wine stores (apart from the restricted number of stores owned by major producers) are not permitted?
Well, this was a store with a difference: customers could taste a range of county wines, and they could look at the bottles. But they couldn't buy any.
The point of this anti-store (open on a Sunday afternoon) was to highlight the problems many Ontario wine producers face in selling their wine. The LCBO, by far the most important alcohol retailer, stocks only a small proportion of the wines made in the province. Despite programs that allow some smaller wineries some shelf-space, the LCBO tends to favour the big producers.
This leaves most of Ontario's wineries only one main retail outlet: the stores at the wineries themselves. And at this time of the year, after the summer tourist season, traffic tends to drop off fairly dramatically. Other retail channels, such as online sales and sales through home-delivery programs, are pretty marginal.
It's a problem that, in principle, could be overcome by allowing wine sales in corner stores, but Prince Edward County producers are the first to recognize they probably wouldn't benefit much from that solution. Corner stores are likely to stock relatively inexpensive wines, and many county wines sell for $20 and more.
So these wineries are looking for changes in the LCBO. They want the LCBO to carry a wider range of Ontario wines and to designate shelves for the province's wine regions: Niagara Peninsula, Lake Erie North Shore and Prince Edward County.
It's not likely to strike a receptive chord in the LCBO, where there's continuing resistance to even recognizing the difference between "Cellared in Canada" wines (blends that are predominantly foreign wines) and Ontario wine.
A recent press release from the LCBO crowed that it sold $270 million of "Ontario wine" last year. Meanwhile, the LCBO annual report for 2005-06 states that sales of Ontario VQA wines totalled $52 million. It's unbelievable that the LCBO would continue in this deceptive description of "Cellared in Canada" wines as "Ontario wine." They might be produced by Ontario wineries, but they are definitely not Ontario wine.
It's true that there are now separate VQA and "Cellared in Canada" shelves in LCBO stores, and that's a good thing. But it's undermined by the persistent practice of mixing "Cellared in Canada" and VQA wines on the shelves. It's a problem British wine writer Jancis Robinson deplored when she was last here, and that the wine producers of Prince Edward County draw attention to as well.
I wish the county's wine producers luck with the LCBO, but I'm not promising to give up wine until they're successful. The LCBO has been paring its offerings, and it's hard to see the sort of turnaround in marketing philosophy that would give Ontario's smaller wineries the fair treatment they're looking for.
Two Ontario wines (real Ontario wines) and two from other parts of the Americas on today's rack.