VQA is dominated by the big wineries

There was a time when followers of BC wines were forced to drink dreadful wines with names like Uniake. In the bad old days BC wineries made bad plonk en masse from grape varieties such as de Chaunac and Chancellor--grape varieties bred to throw off huge volumes of fruit with no regard for the quality of the wines they made. And the wines tasted like it. The reason we were subject to such headache-inducing fodder when the US was already producing world-beating wines was because the Canadian government slapped onerous tariffs on imported wine on order to protect the Canadian industry.

Then came the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. Governments saw a flood of cheap but high-quality wine heading for a Canadian market no longer protected by tariffs.  So, uncharacteristically for government, they did something smart: they paid grape growers to tear out the bad old varieties and plant the "vinifera" varieties--those traditionally grown for wine-making. Out went Marechal Foch, Scheuerbe, and Chancellor. In went Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot.

But that didn't completely solve the problem as there were still some pretty raunchy wines out there in the fledgling industry. So a bunch of winery owners, led by Harry McWatters of Sumac Ridge, decided they needed an appellation system, like the French "Appellation d’origine Controlée," or the Italian "Denominazione di Origine Controllata," to guarantee the quality of the wines released under the wines of BC label.

The French and Italians originally got into the business of regulating their wines as international trade in wine rose at the end of the 1900s and start of the 2000s. Because so many French and Italian wine companies were diluting good French and Italian wine with cheap plonk from Algeria and other African nations, the governments wanted to be able to guarantee the wines were made from grapes from their own country.

But the intent of BC wineries was not quite the same. BC exports very little wine. In fact we consume about five times what we produce. So there was no need to prove to export markets that the wine was from BC. Instead wineries wanted to encourage the improvement of the quality of BC wines. They set up tasting panels and encouraged wineries to submit their wines for VQA (that's an acronym for Vintner's Quality Alliance) approval. That was back in the 1990s.

Well it worked. Either through the VQA or through trial and error, the quality of BC wines has improved. Wines from our province now regularly win medals at international wine competitions. A Syrah from Mission Hill won Best Syrah in the World at the London International Wine Competition a few years back.  Even tiny Morning Bay won a bronze medal for its 2005 Reserve Merlot in New York against merlots from around the world. So increasingly quality is not an issue.

You would think that would mean that VQA has done its job. But that hasn't happened. Increasingly the VQA program has come to be controlled by the large BC wineries and has been used against the smaller wineries. The tasting panels which decide which wines get the VQA endorsement are controlled by winemakers from the big wineries. The fixed fee structure means wineries pay the same fee to have their wines tasted by the VQA panels regardless if they make 5000 cases or 50. The large wineries, seeing that smaller wineries in BC are gaining market share as people are discovering the quirky, expressive and stylistically courageous boutique wines of smaller wineries, have lobbied government to put onerous and expensive record-keeping and testing requirements on smaller wineries, through the VQA program and through other industry associations. All this puts greater and greater expenses on smaller producers because it increases the cost of making a single batch of wine no matter how small the batch.

Worst of all, though, has been the erosion of the VQA brand itself. While ten years ago you could depend on the VQA label to indicate that the wine contained was of the highest quality, increasingly VQA wines are the safest, stylistically least adventurous wines available in the BC marketplace. Because wines must be submitted to an anonymous panel of tasters, and because the failure to attain the VQA status can mean no placement in the BC Liquor Store monopoly, winemakers often make "safe," tepid wines that lack any character or distinction or anything that would make them fail the tasting panels.

And on the other side, increasingly the best wines in BC do not seek VQA designation. The Nota Benes and the Alderlea wines of BC, wines that sell out every year and are carried on the finest restaurant lists, do not need the VQA endorsement because their buyers know the wines are the finest available without the the VQA stamp of approval. If you talk to the top sommeliers at the top restaurants in Vancouver, they don't care if the wines are VQA or not.

So, having at one time been the mark of assurance of quality, VQA has now come to signify mass-produced, stylistically unambitious wine. It's a shame that what began as an attempt to give consumers some assurance has become a symbol for a politicized marketplace in which the big boys are trying to drive the little boys out of business.

Cheers!

Keith

Keith Watt is owner and winemaker at Morning Bay Vineyards on Pender Island, BC.