What to get the wine lover in your life for Christmas? A bottle of wine? Nah, they've probably already got one of those. They just might enjoy these two titles about wine however, both of which are by Ontario authors.
Niagara’s Wine Visionaries – Profiles of the Pioneering Winemakers
Linda Bramble
James Lorimer & Company Ltd, 2009, 224 pages. $29.95
I grew up in Niagara and then moved to Toronto after university so I thought I knew how the Niagara Wine industry had developed. I’m part of the Baby Duck and straw-covered Chianti bottle generation so I had lived through the important parts. However, it turns out that I had missed most of what was going on.
In the first chapter of Niagara's Wine Visionaries, Linda Bramble talks about the “sublime madness” of growing fine wine in Ontario. She covers the three major areas for grape growing and also talks about the history of the wine regions starting in 1811 with Johann Schiller’s commercial vineyard and winery in Cooksville, Ontario, and finishing with an overview of the present state of wineries in Prince Edward County.
Bramble gets into the real focus of the book in the second chapter when she talks about 10-year-old John Ghetti meeting Harry Hatch who had just purchased T. G. Bright and Company, a Niagara Falls winery. Only 10 years later, Ghetti would be the fieldman in charge of 1300 acres of experimental grapes for Brights. Over the next several years, Harry Hatch changed the way Ontario wines were produced, spending money on research into new varieties and methods of farming those new varieties to produce better wines.
In a similar fashion, Bramble talks about 8 key figures, or visionaries, and how they influenced the Ontario wine industry, in each of the other 8 chapters of the book. These visionaries are the people who could see beyond their own wineries and work towards what was best for the industry as a whole. These names should be familiar to most people who have been enjoying Ontario wines over the past 15 to 20 years: Donald Ziraldo and Karl Kaiser of Inniskillin, Len Pennachetti of Cave Springs, the Speck brothers of Henry of Pelham and so on, ending with Norm Beal of Peninsula Ridge.
Over the course of the book, Bramble explains the complex, and odd, relationship of the wine industry, the LCBO and the government. Readers also learn about the long history of the current “Cellared in Canada” discussion that keeps popping up in the papers.
I would recommend this book as a “must read” for anyone who is interested in Ontario wines or in the history of Ontario.
Tony Aspler’s Cellar Book
Tony Aspler
Random House Canada, 2009, 339 pages. $32.95
Tony Aspler’s Cellar Book is subtitled “How to Design, Build, Stock and Manage Your Wine Cellar Wherever You Live” which is quite an ambitious goal. Aspler accomplishes this with the clarity, breadth of knowledge, and good humour that his writing usually exhibits.
Aspler covers the history of the wine cellar, where you should build the cellar, your options if you can’t build a cellar and then what you should put into the cellar. Although this sounds a little tedious, the book is full of anecdotes from Aspler and many of his friends about their cellars and their experiences with wine. People in Toronto will grin when they read a story involving a friend of Aspler’s and David Miller, long before he was Mayor.
For anyone just starting a wine cellar, Aspler provides suggestions for a 48-bottle beginners cellar that he estimates will cost about $20 per bottle. However, he also points out that if you drink a bottle a night and you want to be prepared, you really need a 1000-bottle cellar.
The largest part of the book is a review of the major wine regions in the world and a listing of Aspler’s “Dream Cellar”, his current personal choices from every area. He follows this with extensive charts detailing styles of wine by colour and country and also an extensive alphabetic list of wines with their styles, origins and the grapes in the wines.
The final section of the book is about tasting and serving wine, cooking with wine, food and wine matching and then wine alternatives. This last section is not about alternatives to wine. It’s about alternative wines by style.
The epilogue to the book is about the difficulties Aspler runs into while trying to build a wine cellar in his new condo. It’s actually worth reading first!
This is a good book for people who are just getting involved in wine and don’t yet have a cellar, or who are planning their first wine cellar, progressing beyond the cardboard box under the stairs.
