Vincor goes for the gold rings
By John Schreiner
February 8, 2007
Vincor Canada has scored a sponsorship deal with the Vancouver Olympic Organizing committee that will enable it to show off its wines not only at the 2010 winter Olympics but also at the summer games in Beijing in 2008 and in London in 2012.
It should prove a good opportunity to parade Canadian wines on a world stage – especially icewine in China, a big, if difficult, market for Canadian icewine.
What Vincor is paying to be an Olympic sponsor has not been announced. While deals like this never come cheap, there usually is payoff in all of the exposure.
Very likely, this is the first time that a Canadian wine producer has been a sponsor of Olympic games in Canada.
Certainly, there would have been no Canadian wine sponsor for the Montreal games in 1972. At the time, there was no Canadian wine that merited a place on the world stage. Not that the Canadian wine industry would have admitted as much. Andrés Wines, as it was then called, was involved around that time in exporting Baby Duck to Britain, and importing Ginger Beer to Canada in exchange. Both flopped in each other’s markets.
There probably was not a wine sponsor for the Calgary winter Olympics in 1988. That was at the time when the Canadian government was concluding a free trade agreement with the U.S. which stripped away protections for Canadian wine in the home market. Conventional wisdom was that Canadian wine was a dead industry.
Free trade did what any student of economics 101 would have expected. Canadian wine producers chose to compete rather than go away. With the help of some transition money from governments, a major replanting of vineyards was kicked off. Quality wine varieties replaced mediocre ones.
Those plantings now are producing wines as good as any in the world. Far from being embarrassed to pour Canadians to international visitors, we can do so with pride.
The only problem is that we don’t have enough of that great wine to go around.
Vincor will need a lot of wine for lubricating the many Olympic occasions calling for wines. Two specific Olympic wines will be launched this summer by Vincor, under the label Esprit, and will be available across Canada in liquor stores. Some proceeds from the sales help support athletes.
There is an Esprit Chardonnay and an Esprit Merlot. I have tasted both and found them to be exactly the sort of easy-drinking, affordable wines that I would expect to find at après-ski events.
Neither wine is a VQA wine because each bottle includes some imported wine in the blend. It is a bit disappointing to celebrate Canadian wine with the help of imported blending material. But there is a fact of life here, as one Vincor official explained to me: there is simply not enough wine available from Canadian vineyards to support the volumes than an Olympic brand requires.
Obviously, there will also be the really toney Olympic dinners and celebrations which will call for VQA wines. After all, the members of the International Olympic Committee and the leaders of sporting delegations have gold-plated palates that can be satisfied only with the best we have to offer.
And that’s where Vincor has grabbed an opportunity – to alert the world’s business class travellers to the quality of wines now being made in Canada, both by the Vincor wineries and by Vincor’s peers.
One thing worries me, however. If all the best wines we make are already so tightly allocated that three bottles arrive from a producer when you have ordered six, what’s it going to be like when the world discovers our secret? And what’s that going to do to wine prices?
goodgrog@shaw.ca
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