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Oh yeah, that's rough. I'll admit to having a strong affection for Wayne Gretsky Estates cabernet though. Mostly because its a total oddity in the US. It also t

• cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  The Wayne Gretzky thing is just yet another label of Andrew Peller, one of the two specially-blessed mega corps that get additional privileges from the Ontario gov't (can have their own offsite winery retail stores, are allowed to import foreign grapes and sell them as Ontario product, etc.). But they're one of the better labels here. The path to financial success in Ontario's wine industry seems to be to dump a pile of money in and produce an OK product that doesn't rock the boat too much (same 4 or 5 grape varieties that everyone else here uses) with a fancy new name for a few years and then sell out to Vincorp or Andrew Peller and then get out. But we have a wanna-be AOC system here (the VQA) that stops you from doing anything interesting. You can't even put the words "Ontario" or "Estate" or "Niagara Escarpment" on the bottle's label if you grow anything other than their mandated list of approved grape varietals (no new hybrids! has to be a fancy European grape that will probably just die here or make mediocre wine anyways). B.C. has a healthier wine industry. Smaller minimum acreage requirements, more experimentation. And there's some interesting new things coming out of Quebec and Nova Scotia. I'd like to have a winery some day. But not in this Can't Do province.