Natalie MacLean says Atlantic Canada has done a great job marketing itself as a tourism destination. Next is to micro-focus that message to wine and food lovers

For the young Natalie MacLean, highland dance was a big part of life growing up in Lower Sackville, N.S. From the age of nine, she practiced three hours a day. “I’d do one hour before school and two hours after school, plus homework, which carried over into all the other facets of my life in terms of discipline and focus,” says MacLean from her Ottawa home. “As a highland dancer there are a variety of dances, but you really try to perfect four of them. If you can imagine: three hours a day for 15 years, mostly working on four dances that are three minutes long. That’s focus.”

The practice paid off; MacLean was a successful competitor, placing fifth at the world championships in Scotland in 1983 when she was 17 years old. “I attribute a lot of what I’ve achieved in my career to the discipline I learned through highland dancing,” she says.

MacLean is author of the 2006 bestseller Red, White and Drunk All Over, was named one of Canada’s Top 30 Power Women by Chatelaine, and is the only person to have won both the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d’Escoffier International.

Today the well-known sommelier and wine writer, who still has a home in Halifax, believes the role of food and wine in Atlantic Canada’s economic competitiveness is critical and will increase in importance in future. “[The region] is ideally positioned to be the next food-and-drink destination,” she says. 

Atlantic Canada’s burgeoning wine industry, famed seafood, and top-notch local producers of food and drink, such as Cape Breton’s Glenora Distillery’s single-malt whisky, make it the total package that discerning travelers seek out in a food-and-wine destination. While Nova Scotia has many of the grape-based wineries, the other Atlantic provinces have fruit-based wineries that make excellent wine from blueberries, blackberries, cranberries, and other fruits. “Some are dry, and some are dessert wines. I call them pie in a glass,” says MacLean. “They’re glorious. They give people a taste of the Maritimes.”

MacLean says Atlantic Canada has done a wonderful job marketing itself as a tourism destination, and it should micro-focus that message to wine and food lovers. “The producers are ready. It’s not like we need a few more wineries or higher standards or qualities; not at all,” she says. “It’s there now in terms of both the numbers of wineries and the quality of wines they’re producing. The food has long been there. The wine industry is vibrant and thriving. They’re not hobby farms. They’re full-fledged serious wineries producing wines that compete on an international stage, so that when someone from Toronto or New York comes for vacation, they’ll drink those wines and be comparable to wines they’ve had elsewhere in the world.”

MacLean enjoys tasting wine every day as the editor of Canada’s largest wine website, www.nataliemaclean.com, which has more than 120,000 subscribers to her e-newsletter. Still, it took time to develop her palate. “What was on the kitchen table when I was growing up in Lower Sackville and Cape Breton was either mostly beer or whisky, and I didn’t like the taste of either,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was dating my husband, Andrew, that I started to get a taste for wine. He’d order a bottle with dinner, and I’d have a little bit.”

Later, Andrew suggested they take a wine appreciation-course. MacLean likes to joke that her husband “drove her to drink.” While wine can attract obsessive-compulsive personalities, it appeals to
MacLean for various reasons. “There’s the pleasure you get from wine, and on another level there’s the sensory pleasure that involves more of the intellect when you start defining flavours from different regions. If you think about all the wine regions in the world, the fact that there are more than one million producers and what they produce changes every year, layer onto that all the food pairings and history and the list goes on and on. I said before, you could do a liberal arts degree with wine as the organizing hub, because if you think about it, wine is connected with history, geography and commerce, agriculture, science and trade. It’s a way of seeing the world and it’s a very pleasant way of seeing the world. ”

At one point in her career, MacLean started to feel guilty that she hadn’t become something more meaningful, such as a missionary helping people in the Third World. “What am I doing? Helping people buy wine,” she says. “But I think there’s a role for helping people deepen their pleasure of wine and life,” she says. “I think there’s a role for helping people increase their happiness. Life’s tough for most of us. We work hard all day, and to come home at the end of a day and have a nice glass of wine with your family and unwind over a nice meal. There’s something to be said for that.”