A little w(h)ine ...

I like a glass of red wine.  There may be a case to be made that I like a glass of wine just a little too much, as that glass has become a daily glass of wine and it doesn’t always remain just one glass.  My defense is that I subscribe to the Mediterranean diet for heart health, which suggests that red wine and olive oil are the secrets to a healthy heart.  I may be paraphrasing just a bit and over-emphasizing the value of the wine, but it’s my excuse and I like it.

In our house, we have set a price point of $10 for a bottle of wine and we can buy some surprisingly good wines for less than that.  (I won’t say that these are great wines or fine wine – they are very good house wines that we enjoy.)  There is terrific value in some Chilean, French, Italian and South African wines.  We can occasionally find something in that price range from the States and, less frequently, from Australia.  What is much harder to find is a Canadian wine under $10.

It’s a shame.  I live reasonably close to the Niagara wine region and it’s a fun afternoon to go and taste the wines from our local vineyards.  There are a few wines we like, but they are almost all priced at $12 and up.  That doesn’t seem like a big enough difference to avoid buying them, but when we compare that $12 or $13 or $17 bottle from Niagara against a similarly-priced - or even an under-$10 - bottle from Europe, there really is no comparison – the cheaper wines are the ones we prefer.

Now, you might be thinking that we just don’t appreciate a good wine or know what a fine wine should taste like.  I would have to disagree.  While I will never claim to be a wine connoisseur and I have not studied wine, we have friends who are oenophiles and because of them I have tasted some pretty fine wines.  I do know how fine a wine can be. 

I wish I knew if Canadian wines are priced as they are because it’s the cost of production and building the industry, or if they are comparing themselves against some of their pricier competition from elsewhere (and not comparing well, in my opinion) or wineries are trying to establish themselves as producers of an upper-scale product.  Whatever the reason, it’s hard for us to justify the extra money.  I will confess that there are some Canadian wines for which we’ll splash out $17 or $18 a bottle – we really do like them - but we wonder afterward if it was the best value for our money.  Probably not, but those particular wines have something we haven’t found in any other wine we’ve tried.  For that reason, it’s worth it those few times we indulge.

I would like to be more supportive of the Canadian wine industry, but right now, it just doesn’t make a lot of cents … er, sense.