Grape Juice

I don’t make any bones about the fact that I really enjoy Ontario wines. Looking at the tastings listed in Grape Juice, you would think that’s all I drank. While that’s not really that far off the truth, there are several factors that bias me in that direction. First and foremost is proximity. I’m less than half an hour (my driving speed mind you) away from Niagara-on-the-Lake, where dozens of vineyards are just sitting waiting for you to drop in and try things. As a result I often have such an enormous list of Ontario wines that I would like to try that everything else gets pushed to the backburner. You know, for that never-going-to-happen point in time when you’ve tried all the local wines you wanted to and your tasting list stands empty…

Another part of the problem is that Ontario wines, in my opinion, are second to none. They always taste very well at competitions and people who try them for the first time are more often than not very pleasantly surprised. There’s a great variety available to try, and some of the most dedicated cool climate wine makers in the world. How then, could I not be all ga-ga for provincial vintages?

Despite the draw of proximity, quality, and the idea of promoting of Canadian products, I have had an absolute bugger of a time trying to get Canadian wines to accompany my dinner is some of Southern Ontario’s restaurants. Unless you’re right in NOTL, where it would be commercial suicide not to offer local wines, it’s no easier to find canuck offerings on our own wine lists than it is to find them down in California. Except for icewine. To which I only have one thing to say really: we make more good wine than just icewine. A lot more. I feel like I should caps lock that statement, or splash it all over every post I make until people take the hint. Enough with the icewine. If I walk into one more establishment and find that the only Canadian on board is Inniskillin ice wine (no offense to Inniskillin, just seems to be the way it goes), I’m absolutely going to walk out and go elsewhere.

I’m not saying that Canadian restaurants should be shackled into only serving Canadian wines as some sort of cultural obligation, but hey, it would be nice to see one red and one white on the list. Keep the ice wine, the ice wine is superb, but there are those of us out there that don’t particularly care for it (I’m working on this), and may want to try some of the other things available from just down the road. I wouldn’t be so liable to push this if I thought, in any way, that I was endangering the reputation of these restaurants by recommending bottom tier wine. There’s nothing worse than a frothing yokel who stomps around squealing the virtues of local products. I feel confident that I’m not one of those people, and that we could benefit from a little patriotism in this case.

Have a little pride folks.

It seems like every time we head down to Niagara to do some tastings, there are some vineyards that impress, and some that we swear we’ll never spend another of our hard-earned pennies at. This last trip was no different and in fact provided several prime examples of the sorts of chivalry and chicanery that can make or break a tasting.

A-Plus Staff

Although this might seem like a bit of a no-brainer, you would be surprised at how diverse a customer experience can be had. I believe we visited upwards of 16 vineyards in two days and thus had a pretty good feel for what was average, what was exceptional, and what was downright rotten. (more…)

Mark Fisher’s post over at Uncorked about a study that examined how restaurants can entice diners to buy more wine to accompany their food couldn’t have come at a more timely moment for us Grape Juice folk. We had just had dinner at one of the uber-restaurants in Toronto, recognized as a fab wine place by the Wine Spectator no less, and received some of the worst wine service we’ve ever had (more on that later). To top it off, the bottle of Burgundian red that we selected was later found in a retail store for not half, not a third, but a quarter of the price that was charged at the restaurant.

Does the study address this issue? Oh it certainly does. It’s sage advice is to promote ‘higher margin’ wines while avoiding pesky little cash inhibitors called promotions. It boggles the mind from the consumer’s point of view. I want value from top to bottom on a wine list; I want recommendations based on suitability, not profit (I know that’s a lot to ask); I want to be treated as something other than a walking, oinking piggy bank. (more…)

Held in Toronto from November 23rd-26th, the Gourmet Wine & Food Show was a public event billed as “Toronto’s Best Party”. Why has it taken me so long to post about it? Frankly I needed a little time to consider how I was going to approach the subject and I also needed to try an view the expo from a variety of perspectives in order to understand my own experience.

Michelle and I had obtained media passes by virtue of our blog, and my occasional contribution to VINES Magazine, one of the event’s sponsors. I, by the kindness of my bosses, had been given two of the four days off, even though harvest was only just wrapping up. I hadn’t been to a proper function that required more than clean jeans in four months; I was excited. My media pass was sure to open doors, uncork bottles, and generally be a magnet for marketing attention. (more…)

February 5th marked the first day that Ontario residents will be paying more, but helping the environment, with every wine & spirit purchase.

Billed as ‘an important environmental initiative’ the government organized Bag It Back (Ontario Deposit Return Program) system will see a price hike of twenty cents on every bottle of wine sold in the province. Consumers can recoup this extra cost by returning their empty bottles to The Beer Store.

The LCBO, which sells wine and spirit out of a separate retail entity, is trying to increase recovery rates on alcoholic beverage containers, 80 million of which, the Board estimates, end up in Ontario landfills every year. The separate program is designed to ‘free up’ room in our Blue Boxes, thus maximizing recovery of all recyclable materials, not just bottles. (more…)

Please don’t.

Sometimes it happens by accident, simply through a lack of knowledge about web etiquette, propriety and how the whole URI system works; other times it’s a conscious effort to scrape visual content from one site and plop it onto another without costing the receiving site any precious bandwidth. Either way, it’s totally unacceptable.

I’ve noticed for the past couple of weeks that Grape Juice’s incoming links list has been growing in fits and spurts, which is great! I check all incoming links and respond to comments on our content whenever possible, but in several of the new link cases, there was no Grape Juice material to be found save for leeched images still bearing our domain name in the link. I suspect that in the cases I’m talking about, its simple misunderstanding and not an organized attempt at leeching. The cases seem isolated and are probably not a huge drain on our bandwidth, but I thought I would bring it up seeing that a lot of the images on these sites are posted directly from other sites…I can’t be the only one that has noticed.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term hot-linking, here’s a pretty good definition:

“Hotlinking” (also called “hot linking”, “leeching”, and “bandwidth theft”) is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is direct linking to the images or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner (usually without permission, thus stealing bandwidth). This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft. …Some disadvantages of hot linking worth considering are that the webpage generally loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web hosting server than the webpage is hosted on” — From Free-Webhosts.com

The general rule is that you save a copy of whatever image you wish to use onto your web server, and credit the site that you took it from. Please don’t just insert images into your posts using pre-existing URIs.