Laying down the law

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Why Ontario permits wine made from some varieties, disallows others I recently wrote about the VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance), Ontario's wine law, and I had a lot of inquiries about wine laws in general. Why are they necessary? What do they regulate? Are there any general rules for understanding them? The last question is the easiest to answer. There are no general rules covering wine laws. They vary from country to country and, in countries (like Canada) that have no national wine law, from region to region. Some are more restrictive, others are more lax. But the overall aims of wine laws (as misguided as they might be in some cases) are to give consumers some confidence in what they are buying and to protect wine industries from practices by individuals that might affect an industry at large. You have only to think of the damage done to Austrian wine by the so-called "anti-freeze scandal" of the mid-1980s to see the implications of rogue wine producers. It's the same with some Italian wine regions more recently; the discovery of fraud by some producers in these regions cast doubt on the authenticity of all the wines from those regions. But these are extreme cases. Some were criminal actions that no regulations can easily prevent. For the most part, wine laws are concerned with technical issues -- technical, but still of importance to consumers. Many laws, for example, regulate the grape varieties that can be used in a particular region. In French law, each designated wine region (appellation) is limited to growing specific varieties for AOC-designated wine (Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée). And it helps to have wine classified as AOC, because it's widely regarded as an indicator of quality and producers can charge higher prices for AOC wine. So producers who want their wines labelled as Bordeaux, Burgundy (or any of their sub-appellations), or Champagne or Alsace, may use only the grape varieties permitted by wine law. VQA law does the same in Ontario. If a producer wants his or her wine classified VQA, it must be made from a permitted variety. The reasons for permitting and excluding grape varieties are varied. In France, it's a belief that centuries of experience have demonstrated that some varieties grow best, and make the best wine, in certain areas. Those varieties are what each region's wine reputation is built on; think of pinot noir and chardonnay, the varieties used in the great majority of wines from Burgundy. To deter any producer from harming Burgundy's reputation by producing inferior wine, other varieties (with a few exceptions) are banned. In Ontario, the underlying concern was to distance the province's modern wine industry from the bad old days, when wine was made from hybrid and native varieties. Although these varieties can make interesting (and sometimes very good) wines, most don't have the intrinsic quality to make wines as good as those from vitis vinifera, the class of grapes that includes varieties we're most familiar with. So wine law can serve a number of purposes, and there's no doubt that it's necessary. The question is how far its reach should extend.