Monday, March 21 2011

Spring, Supermoons, La Belle Province and Travelling Companions

Westerners see a man in the moon, the Japanese see a rabbit. I see impact craters.

Life is suddenly very event-filled: here we are, just past the first day of Spring, under the watchful glare of the man in the moon, who is at perigee (which is twice as much as one-a-gee) whilst time and supertides wait for no man. I checked the tideline out on the beach in front of my house, and sure enough, the line of flotsam (is it flotsam when it’s on the shore, or jetsam?) was a few centimetres higher than the traditional line of beach-goo. I also went out at about three am, when the skies finally cleared and took a look at the moon. I could have read a newspaper, if I’d remembered my glasses and had a newspaper, and was comfortable catching up on local news standing naked on my patio, it was so bright.

As is my on and off again habit, I’m writing this on an airplane when I could be profitably employed doing something else, like napping or obtaining an array of alcoholic beverages to pass the time. Seriously, that little voice of conscience that pops up and says, ‘You’ve only been putting out two blog entries a month, lazy-bones’, he can just pipe down. It’s quality, not quantity.

Oh dang. It’s always something, isn’t it?

In any case, the plane (after suitable delays to lose the luggage, man-hours and patience of the passengers) is heading to Montreal, where I’ll hit dirt with my Quebec cohort, Frank and my road-buddy The Tiki Man. The three of us will do a quick tour for technical and sales support. Frank’s a keener (as befits someone with an engineering background) but Quebec is opening up to Wine On Premise operations, and I’ve been involved in the set-up of hundreds of them. I actually sort-of wrote the book, more like a manual, really, so I’m going to offer a helping hand.

 
The wheels of commerce

Wine On Premise? If you’re not a regular user of consumer-produced winemaking products, there’s two ways to use them. First, you can take home your wine ‘kit’, a bag-in-box filled with single-strength varietal wine grape juice and concentrate and a bundle of all the stuff you need to turn it into wine (yeast, oak, clarifiers and stabilisers) and ferment, clarify and bottle in your own home. Yay you!

Second, if your home isn’t suitable (too hot, too cold, too small, too your-spouse-isn’t-having-it), in some provinces you can walk into a shop, choose from one of hundreds of wines they offer, pay for it, and hand it straight back to the staff member, and for a small fee they’ll make it up, you pitch the yeast (a very important legal point which makes it your wine, and not some sort of tax-avoidance procedure) and come back in four to eight weeks to bottle the young-but-delicious wine. They do everything in between, including all of the necessary measuring and analysing, transferring, filtering and washing up. Yay you, and that was pretty simple!

Wine On Premise (sometimes we refer to it as Ferment On Premise) came about because of a teensy little error in the legislation for personal winemaking in the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. There was a piece of boilerplate legal copy that was used as a guideline for all of the provinces. Most of them adopted it verbatim, and the clause in question said that consumers could make any amount of beer or wine, strictly for their own use, in their premises.

(The USA has a similar piece of legislation, set during prohibition and later ratified by President Carter that says the same sort of things, but limits citizens to 100 US gallons [80 Imperial gallons, or 480 bottles] per adult, to a maximum of 200 gallons per household. During busy times I’ve made 100 US gallons a week, so spare a thought for our hard done-by American cousins.)

Where things got kooky for BC and Ontario was the change of the word ‘their’ to ‘a’. Pretty quick some bright boy in Ontario figured out, ‘Hey, I have ‘a’ premise!’ and started letting people make wine in his supply store. It wasn’t long before the gold rush started in both provinces, and at its peak a dozen new stores were going up every week, flooding suppliers with requests for products. It was an amazing time, with companies that had been selling winemaking supplies for decades suddenly growing 20% or 30% per year, year after year.

Ah, the old days. It was so busy that a lowly goofball of a supply clerk could suddenly find himself Technical Services Manager by virtue of being able to write a complete sentence and answer a telephone without setting fire to his desk. I kind of miss those days, the effortless growth, the cowboy attitudes of making and shipping and endless ten hour days of figuring out just what the industry was going to look like from one week to the next.

It didn’t last, of course, and eventually some areas of the market became heavily saturated, with the usual consequences of direct competition between specialty stores, and growth slowed. That was when Winexpert’s (called, at the time, Brew King, like we made coffee or something) strategy of protected trading areas helped out. Because the company had sales agreements that gave their retailers a specific geographic zone where we wouldn’t sell to anybody else, we were able to support those retail partners with quality assurance and directed promotions. It was still plenty of work, but that policy made us a lot stronger than we would have been otherwise, and today we have a network of great retail partners that make us proud.

The first two provinces were Ontario and Quebec, but now New Brunswick and Saskatchewan have joined in the fun and Quebec is in early days, and the new retailers are getting ready for the same sort of start-up fun that always comes along with a new venture. Questions like ‘how big should my display area be (small), where should I put the wash-up area? (where nobody can see it) and what kits should I carry? (mine) all need answering in detail, so I’m in the air like junior birdman again.

The USA never got anything like our Wine On Premise legislation. The interests there are very heavily vested in the status quo. It’s a legal battle to allow for shipment of wine between states, with their multiply tiered distribution systems and restrictive laws. The only way to do it is to obtain a winery license (where applicable) and make the wine under that, or to operate what is called a ‘Home Fermenter Center’, where consumers buy the kit and leave it there, but must do all of the procedures, including racking, fining, stabilising and filtering, as well as bottling. There are some successes with both models, but it’s not like the willy nilly proliferation that we saw in Canada.

Yes, it's that beautiful, all of the time

I really like Quebec, the small part I’ve seen, at least. That amounts to Montreal and Quebec City and a few days spent in Chambly. It’s so different from everywhere else. Language, sure. But I’ve lived in other countries where English wasn’t the first language and each was different and interesting in its own way. But Quebec has an ingrained fierceness about their heritage and culture, and while they can be more or less demonstrative of it, it’s always there, in a sense of passion behind friendly words and sentimentality for the old ways. I like that: you can’t really know what your future will be if you don’t recall your own past, and pay respect to the people who lived there.

Dude, you do you have pants on ?

So it’s me and The Tiki Man on the road again. Winexpert is having a little fun with Tiki, so he’s spending time on the road in interesting and unusual places. If you follow him on Facebook you’ll be able to look at his galleries and catch his travels. His first trip was to Winnipeg, and while he was unsure about snow and minus 20 temperatures he had a great time. Quebec is a bit warmer, but still chilly for a south-seas native like him, but I’ve got him a little toque and we’ll make sure he has a wee nip to stay toasty.

Ah, time to put away the laptop and get herded to the concourse for luggage recriminations and confusion. Look out Quebec, I’m baaaack.

Posted by Babbling Tim AT 8:49PM 5 Comments Comments Post A Comment Post A Comment Email Email

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