Columnists
Wine Scandal
There is a great deal of trust in the food industry. From the grocery store to every restaurant you dine at. You expect what’s on the label or menu to be true.
Yet few things in the culinary world taste as distinctly of place as wine. Chocolate, tea, and coffee can reflect their geographical origins, but wine sits at the very top of that list. If a wine label claims to come from a certain location, it must truly come from that location.
It is why you rarely see the grape names on European wines. What matters most is where the grapes were grown. Names like Chianti, Barolo, Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne refer to the place the grapes are grown, and buyers have come to expect the wine from specific regions to embody a particular style.
There are laws in the winemaking world that honour consumer trust. There are regulations in place dictating required yields, wine styles and permitted grape varieties—all to ensure that when someone buys a bottle of a wine from a certain region, the wine inside genuinely reflects it.
But over the years there have been a few scandals, breaking that trust.
Most recently, a former French winemaker was sentenced to prison for producing thousands of bottles falsely labelled as Champagne. Didier Chopin was jailed for 18 months with another 30 months of prison time suspended. He was also fined €100,000, and his holding company was fined €300,000, according to French media. Flavourings were added to still wines sourced from France’s Ardèche region and Spain which were then carbonated with carbon dioxide gas before being labelled as genuine Champagne.
This is a serious breach of consumer trust, and without significant retribution could risk tarnishing the reputation of the entire region of Champagne.
Here in our own backyard we have laws that protect the Prince Edward County designation. If a label reads “Prince Edward County”, the grapes must come from here. If you see “VQA Ontario” this implies that grapes from different appellations may have been blended together to produce the wine. A “Niagara Peninsula” label—or one of its subregions—guarantees that the grapes were grown there, regardless of where the wine was made.
Wine lovers who visit our region are in a lucky position as local winemakers have access not only to County-grown fruit, but also to grapes from another appellation, the Niagara Peninsula. When visitors want to strictly taste PEC wines, they miss out on the opportunity to taste wines made here from grapes grown across the lake. Allowing tasters to experience how skilled our winemakers truly are by comparing grapes grown in different regions but shaped by the same hand at one winery is yet another feature of Prince Edward County that makes it so special and unique.
Comments (0)