Canadian Icewine promoted in Taipei for holiday season
Sue-Ann Staff is one cool customer.
The 33-year-old Canadian, who is one of Canada’s premier Icewine makers, didn’t plan on making a career out of producing the popular beverage. She originally wanted to use her country’s plentiful ice reserves and make her living skating on it instead of freezing grapes with it.
The former figure skater eventually hung up the blades however and followed her family calling and became part of a long family line in the viticulture region in Canada’s Niagara region. Figure skating’s loss was certainly the Canadian Icewine industry’s gain as Staff has racked up bushels of awards since earning her graduate degree in Oenology from the University of Adelaide in 1996.
One of her career highlights was in 2002 when she was named Ontario’s ‘Winemaker of the Year’ for consistency in producing quality wines, breadth of winemaking, success in International and Regional wine competitions and overall contributions to the wine industry. She was the youngest winner of the award and also the first female to ever achieve the honor. She has also won numerous other International and Regional accolades.
The tall blonde was in Taipei as part of a Canadian Trade Office promotion called the Canadian Icewine Challenge II.
Staff gave a presentation on the wine, which is recommended for dessert and as an aperitif.
She said it was made with grapes naturally frozen on the vine and harvested and pressed at minus eight degrees Celsius.
The wine is pressed continuously and the yield of juice from grapes was relatively low at one drop of juice per grape.
“It’s like getting water from a rock,” she said.
She said the smell of the wine is probably one of the most important components.
“Aroma is 90 percent of the enjoyment of any wine,” she added.
According to her the best Icewine has a perfect balance of sweetness, alcohol and acidity.
Staff told of the proper way to store the wine and the best food accompaniments with it such as rich, fatty, pungent and salty cheeses and desserts that weren’t sweeter than the wine itself.
Because of the popularity of Icewine in Taiwan — it’s Canada’s largest export market for the product — the success has spawned many watered-down imitators.
As a result of that, for the second straight year a campaign has been run called VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance), which identifies quality Icewine.
“Taiwanese consumers should be cautious, as certain products in the marketplace do not meet Canadian VQA standards and are not normally listed for sale in Canada or the U.S. as Icewine,” said Gordon Houlden, Executive Director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei in a press release.
Houlden along with Stanley Yan, Group President of the Landis Hotel Taipei, Crystin Chiang, GM of Drinks and Spirits Ltd., and Jevons Yu, Senior Purchasing Manager of the President Chain Store Corp. took part in a blind taste test given by Staff to see whether they could successfully tell the real thing from fakes.
They all picked the authentic Canadian Icewine.
When a friend complimented Niagara winemaker Allan Schmidt for successfully cracking the icewine market in mainland China, Schmidt dismissed it: He wasn't selling his wine in China, he said.
But the friend persisted. He said he was sure he'd seen Schmidt's Vineland Estates icewine for sale there.
"Again, I told him: `No, you must be mistaken,'" Schmidt recalls.
Then the friend gave him a link to a website.
Schmidt was stunned.
There, a Chinese company was selling a product called Vineland icewine, boasting of a joint venture with a Canadian partner and, to top it all off, using a panoramic view of Schmidt's own winery on its Web page.
"They'd taken it right off our website," Schmidt says in a telephone interview. "I was upset."
Four years on, and after spending $60,000 in legal fees trying to protect his trademark in China, he is still upset.
The Chinese promise him a hearing – but not until 2011.
"The whole experience has just left a really bad taste in my mouth," the winemaker says.
China is battling a flood of fakes, from medicines and vaccines to cellphone cards and even Olympic souvenirs.
But when ambitious Chinese counterfeiters fix their sights on foreign manufacturers, no one is safe – not Rolex, not Tag Heuer, and certainly not Canadian icewines.
"Chinese counterfeiters can be incredibly clever," says Vera Sung, a trademark lawyer with the Hong Kong law firm of Oldham Li and Nie. "And the more Canadian icewines grow in price and prestige, the more likely they are to attract counterfeiters."
The impact has hit hard. Sales of Canadian icewine in China have plummeted 60 per cent from highs earlier in the decade, according to the Ontario Wine Council.
The problem, says Sung, arises from an emerging Chinese middle class that sees icewine as a status symbol, but can't distinguish real from fake.
"The problem is, they don't understand what genuine icewine is."
The same might be said of those producing the knock-offs.
This week, Han Ruabing, of Tianjin Canadian Ltd., makers of "Select Late Harvest Gordo Canadian Icewine," defended the quality of her product explaining that they dilute wine concentrate, shipped "directly" from Canada, with only the best quality water.
"Only pure water," she said.
The problem is that real icewine is neither made from concentrate, nor added water – nor, for that matter, with "late harvest" grapes.
Real icewine is produced with grapes frozen on the vine, long after the "late harvest" period has passed.
Nevertheless, the Star found the knock-off "Canadian icewine" for sale through a distributor in the heart of Beijing, complete with a tiny red maple leaf adorning its label.
But it isn't just the icewine that is being targeted. There's even a robust market for knock-off "Canadian icewine bottles"– without wine. A company from China's Shandong province boasts on the Internet that it can produce 300,000 bottles per day.
And fake alcohol production in general in China is so rife that last week the Gansu Province Consumers' Association appealed to the public to smash their bottles following consumption. The aim? To choke off the cheap supply of empty bottles to counterfeiters. Counterfeiters buy them from suppliers who gather them from the garbage.
Meanwhile, a Beijing bar manager, who asked not to be identified, told the Star last week of shopping for Chivas Regal, a deluxe whiskey.
"The vendor held up two seemingly identical bottles and said, `This one is for 70 RMB (about $10). And this one is for 170 RMB (about $25).' They're very open about it," he said. "It's not like it's a secret."
But marketing fake alcohol is risky. In 2005, a Chinese entrepreneur was sentenced to death after industrial alcohol he sold as drinkable alcohol killed 14.
Cognizant of both health and commercial concerns, Beijing police last week conducted multiple raids on hotels and shops selling fake bottles of Moutai, a famous Chinese liquor.
But despite direct appeals to Chinese authorities from Ontario's Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) and Ottawa, the counterfeiting of Canadian icewine continues.
"It remains a serious issue," says Sherri Haigh of the Wine Council of Ontario. More than 70 of its members produce icewine, regarded as the industry's "flagship" product.
Fake Canadian icewines in China come with improbable names like "Maple Dew," "Silver Maple," and "Toronto Icewine." Their labels are clearly marked "Product of Canada/Produit du Canada," and adorned with idyllic pictures of Niagara Falls and red, gold or silver maple leaves.
Some claim to be "Ice Wine Style," a term for which there is no known designation in the world of wine.
Others claim to be the real thing: "Canadian Icewine," using the trademarked, single-word term that only Canadian wines that meet the VQA's strict standards may use.
But as Laurie Macdonald, VQA's executive director, points out, having strict guidelines with the force of law in Canada is one thing. Trying to enforce them worldwide is quite another.
She's aware of the problem's extent: She has two dozen bottles of fake icewine in her Toronto office, almost all from China and Taiwan.
"It's a tough problem when it's outside the country," she says. "There is no magic bullet."
But help could be on the way. China's vice-director of wine quality supervision and inspection, Ma Peixua, told the Star last week that a new national standard for icewine will be implemented Jan. 1.
