For seeing wine as food

John Stuart travels the world visiting vineyards and testing wines to sell at his boutique, Bishop’s Cellar, in downtown Halifax. This year he has already been to Portugal, Morocco, and Spain. Stuart believes the wine culture he witnesses internationally will one day take root in Atlantic Canada, with the Annapolis Valley as its epicentre. “Today only 5% of the wine we sell is local,” he says. “The utopic dream would be that it will be almost impossible to buy anything but local wine in the region.”

Stuart’s ancestors came to Canada from France in the 1780s and began farming, which has since become a family tradition. The 59-year-old grew up on a cattle farm in London, Ont., and in addition to owning Bishop’s Cellar he also operates a small farm in Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Valley.

For Stuart, a fundamental mistake in the industry is to treat wine as booze; instead, he insists it’s essentially a crop: grapes. “To me, wine is food,” he says. “The unique component of grape growing in this region is the dramatic variation in soil types. A grape variety can have a multitude of flavours, depending on the soil type of the vineyard.” Stuart recognized this terroir variety when he planted some of the original vineyards in Grand Pré, N.S., in 1982; at that time he realized soil, water, and sun were the essence of great grape growing.

But the real challenge isn’t Nova Scotia’s soil, it’s the industry’s relative inexperience. Stuart takes a local bottle off the shelf and points to a drab label on the dark glass. It doesn’t grab the eye, which means a consumer’s hand won’t reach for it. “The label will sell the first bottle,” he says. “The wine sells everything after that.”

That’s working for some Nova Scotia wineries. Before last year, no local wine had topped Stuart’s best-seller list. Last year, Nova 7 from Benjamin Bridge topped it three months in a row. Stuart’s utopia creeps a little closer.