[getsmart-l] Fw: [Discover Local Food] Practise what you preach

[John O'Gorman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Discover Local Food 
To: Discover Local Food 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 7:28 AM
Subject: [Discover Local Food] Practise what you preach


Practise what you preach

 

EDITORIAL for Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Beacon Herald

Serving the City of Stratford, and the Counties of Perth, Huron and Oxford

 

The premise of the 100-mile diet is to eat foods from your local area. If one is promoting a 100-mile diet, complete with its environmental benefits, it only makes sense to support that effort with the further promotion of food and drink from within the 100-mile radius.

In its latest Enviro Chic campaign, the LCBO has not.

A two-page spread in a recent LCBO flyer pushing environmentally friendly products features two types of wine.

One is a Tetra Pak of 20 Bees, a VQA wine made by the former Niagara Vintners Inc. We know that that wine, by its VQA designation, was made solely with grapes grown in Ontario.

The other is a Tetra Pak of Peller Estates French Cross Chardonnay. It may be made by an Ontario winery, but Peller's French Cross label is not a VQA product. That means up to 70 per cent of the wine could be imported from anywhere in the world.

As there is nothing on the label of blended wines indicating where the grapes originated, consumers have no way of knowing if they are drinking a wine that was made from grapes grown in Ontario or if the grapes were imported from Chile or Australia or California or any other grape-growing region in the world.

And every other grape-growing region in the world is decidedly outside the 100-mile radius of anywhere in Ontario. (Stratford is almost exactly 100 miles from Niagara's wine region.)
The provincial liquor retailer has admitted its mistake in this regard, but it's a mistake that should never have happened, especially in this format.

The LCBO should know better than to allow this oversight. It is, unfortunately, reflective of the LCBO's general attitude towards VQA wines.

It took a lot of fighting by VQA advocates and the media to get the LCBO to separate the blended "cellared in Canada" wines from the true Ontario wines on the shelves in its stores.
This misrepresentation of a blended wine as a local product is an extension of that fight.

It's not as if Peller Estates - owned by Andrew Peller Ltd., one of the giants of Ontario's wine industry - doesn't have any VQA labels. It has plenty under the Peller Estates label, and there are many more from other wineries under the corporate umbrella such as Hillebrand Estates and Thirty Bench.

To make matters worse, the LCBO ad also features an array of fruits and vegetables, implying they are staples in a locavore's diet (a locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a 100-mile radius; incidentally, locavore was the Oxford English Dictionary's 2007 word of the year). There are grapes and some pears, some broccoflower - and a pair of artichokes. Artichokes are being grown in Ontario but they are still extremely rare here. The closest area to us with a critical mass of artichoke agriculture is California, but most of the world's artichokes are grown in the Mediterranean area.

In the same flyer, the LCBO encourages consumers to "Discover Ontario at their next party," but again, it is pitching blended wines as part of this promotion.

The only assurance consumers have of a wine being a true Ontario wine is the VQA medallion, and these are the only wines that merit being pushed as Ontario products.

The attitude at the LCBO towards VQA wines has to continue to improve - and the retailer's political masters at Queen's Park have to lead the charge.

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