Our New Nova Scotia Wine Culture

It had to happen - sooner or later something good was going to come out of this global warming thing. It seems as if there has been enough of a barely perceptible increase in the degree days that the Annapolis Valley gets to start having people look seriously at growing vinifera grapes (the ones most countries use to make wine from) such as Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, and even a wee bit of Sangiovese.

Last week I was treated to a vineyard visit after having spent the previous day judging wines and beer for the National Amateur Winemakers Association. This was not just any vineyard, though, but that of Dr. Allan McIntyre. Located just east of Blomidon Estates winery in Habitant, Kings County this is one of the most highly regarded suppliers of good fruit to Nova Scotia's wineries. Right now, Gaspereau Vineyards and Jost Winery seem to be buying the bulk of the grapes grown here. The picture above and to the right shows Gina Haverstock, winemaker at Gaspereau Vineyards, walking the land with Flavio, Allan McIntyre's son-in-law, in the middle of the Cabernet Franc, with newly planted Pinot Noir in the background.

I was able to visit on a day when Allan was in the vineyard, toiling away. And my co-visitors were none other than Allan's daughter, Star Chick Sommelier* Alanna McIntyre, her mano Flavio, and Sommelier turned winemaker Gina Haverstock. Allan took the time from his labours to show us how he works some of his magic - the secret? Hard work.

The most interesting thing was the amount of Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc that exists in this vineyard. I had been fortunate enough to taste both the 05 and 06 Cab Francs made with these grapes while at Jost Winery in July. At the time, I was very impressed with the 06 (a very good vintage in Nova Scotia) as it exhibited very little unripe flavour characteristics and was reminiscent of a very good Niagara Cab Franc. I also got to try the 06 Pinot Noir as well, and was happy to find it tasting like Pinot Noir!

The vines in the photo below are mostly Cab Franc, Pinot Noir and some Leon Millot. You can tell the more vigorous Leon Millot, on the right, by the amount of growth on the top of the vines.

This news is not new to those within the industry. They know what is coming. With Benjamin Bridge about to release their second wine, after the successful launch of Nova 7, a semi sparkling (perlant) aromatic wine with a dry finish, they are about to release a dessert wine.

But what really lurks over the horizon there is the upcoming (in maybe as long as two year's time) release of their signature sparkling wines, made in the Methode Champagnoise style, with Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and even some Pinot Meunier all grown organically in the Gaspereau Valley. I have not been lucky enough to taste any yet, but those who have, have been effusive in their praise. Of course, it is not like we'll all be swilling it down like Keiths, as it is rumoured to be planned to be released in the $60 to $80 a bottle range.

So, why the "new" in my title? Well, up until these latest sightings, most of the good wine in Nova Scotia has been made from hybrids, or crosses of grapes that are chosen because of how well they survive our winters, and how they produce in our short growing season. But these latest wines defy that logic.

Two nights before this vineyard tour, I was again in the company of Gina, and we were joined by the new winemaker at Benjamin Bridge, Jean-Benoit Deslauriers at a house party prior to the wine judging the next day. The host, John Starr, opened a bottle of 1986 Cuvée d'Amur from Grand Pré, made by Roger Dial 22 years ago. This wine, made from Michurunetz grapes (a vitis vinifera cross on vitis amurensis rootstalk) was still very much alive, showing an amazingly complex, Burgundian nose, and still packing a solid lump of acidity with fruit remnants. An amazing drink, made moreso by being able to share it with Gina and Jean-Benoit. They are the ones (along with with Jurg Stutz, Hans Christian Jost, and David Beardsall I should add), who are picking up the torch that Roger lit a long time ago. They are working with better grapes every year.

And it is still warming up, so they say....


* sorry Mr. Coad, every place should have one, not just NYC

The Harbour Gets Loaded

Halifax Harbour cannot be made clean by Primary Sewage Treatment Plants and combined sewers.

It can be made cleaner, but not clean.

In the vain hope that Peter Kelly would go swimming for the cameras the day after a severe thunderstorm, I kept a bit quiet for a while on this issue. Now that it looks like he won't get some cool tropical disease, I might as well spill the news. The truth is, we spent millions of dollars on work to change where we put our poop into the environment, and to take some of the easy to remove things out, and that's all we did. The work on the Halifax Harbour Cleanup shut off many of the existing outfalls along our now well used and appreciated waterfront, and consolidated all those little problems into three big ones. It is doing what the engineers intended it to do.

From the rudimentary treatment plants we built, we put special, long outfall pipes out into our harbour so that the pollution is injected into the harbour at a place where it can be more easily flushed out to sea by the tides and currents in the harbour. That makes it all seem better because it is "all gone away".

What no one bothered to explain to the media (which didn't seem to try to understand the project anyway) was just how tough it is to clean up sewage flow when the sewers are combined sewers - they carry both flushed things from homes and businesses, as well as any rain that falls on our streets and roofs. So if it rains in Halifax (I have it on good advice that it does so on occasion) then an immediate, and very high volume (compared to the sewage) flow of runoff whooshes down the pipe, diluting the sewage, sometimes making it over 100 times the flow, and also making it colder than it was.

A huge, cold, dilute organic waste is very very difficult to treat. And to remove a high percentage of the pollutants, especially the organic ones (poop) is almost impossible. Organic waste is treated by biological processes that need some time, which at a high flow means massive tank storage to give the bugs time to eat the poop. Those bugs operate at a speed that is pretty much regulated by temperature - the colder they are, the slower they work, like me. When it rains, the system we now have really does not remove very much of the organic pollution because it would simply be too expensive to build such a massive treatment plant where the sewage has been collected.

But, there are two things that the media has yet to identify and understand, and that therefore mostly remain a mystery to the residents of HRM. First, when it rains, not only can we not treat the huge flow of dilute sewage, our pipes are not big enough to even take it to the new, better discharge sites we put a lot of the investment into creating. At some point, the pipe backs up (hello again, finless brown!) and is dumped directly into the harbour, usually via the old outfall pipe we thought was no longer in service.

The second thing is the real kicker, though. What do our environmental regulators do about this problem? When it rains, the harbour cleanup project allows most of the pollution to run out to the ocean the same as it always did. The total amount of material that causes environmental problems is not really reduced by any normal sewage treatment removal percentage. If, say 100,000 kilograms of poop went to the harbour before we spent all out money on the project, on a rainy day, maybe 75,000 (a wild guess just for demonstration purposes) kilograms of the poop goes to the harbour.

How is this possible given that they had to have a permit from Nova Scotia Environment, with the tacit approval, and funding from Environment Canada (plus DFO has to OK it) to continue to discharge this deleterious substance? Well, have you not heard the old axiom, "The solution to pollution is dilution." ?? That's how. The permit would authorize HRM to discharge as much sewage as they want up to a certain concentration of poop (I heard it was 50-60 ppm when every other Municipality in NS has to meet maximum 30 ppm for an ocean discharge). As long as there is enough rainwater diluting the poop, the regulators can look the other way, and the politicians can pretend they did something.

The sewage coming from a house before dilution has about 250 to 300 ppm of BOD. Stormwater dilution of sewage in a combined sewer is often up to ten times. Discharging more than 50 ppm when diluted 10 times would then be impossible, because it would be at 30 ppm, on average, with no treatment at all! You'd have to add poop (staff toilets in the treatment plants are not that big) to not meet the Approval. So the overflows meet permit with no treatment, because the permit is a bit, well, soft.

Sweet, eh?

Of course, the ecosystem in the harbour does not see it quite the same way. Most of that part of the equation is simply looking for food (poop to us), to live from, and they then strip oxygen from the water to support themselves, to the detriment of other things we might prefer to have live in the harbour.

Most countries regulate discharge of sewage in terms of the amount, or load in kilograms, of BOD per day that a receiving water body is subjected to, no matter how high, or low, the concentration of the discharge. We have ignored the logic of this, and regulate in mg/L or parts per million of BOD (by the way, for the purposes of this discussion, BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) can be considered a laboratory based scientific way of saying "poop".) A two year old having a pee pee off a wharf might not meet the permit because the ammonia discharge in the effluent stream would be too high, but all of peninsular Halifax's sewage running untreated after a storm is just peachy.

This concentration versus loading concept can be explained in terms most Haligonians would understand. If we were out drinking, and I had ten shots of scotch, and you had ten beers, you'd have consumed a lot more liquid than me, but we'd both still be loaded. We all know that it is the alcohol loading that causes us to be loaded, not the water in the drink.

Yes, the harbour is still getting loaded every time it rains.

Cheers!

Another religious experience

After last fall's Mary Gauthier and Ron Hynes concert in a church, I thought that was about as much as you could do with getting former drug addicts to gather in a place of worship to play music. But Tuesday night's Steve Earle concert at St. Matthews managed to match and exceed that show. Let's face it. Mr. Earle has known his share of self inflicted trouble. He has spent a fair amount of time behind bars for drug infractions, ranging from being a Heroin addict caught with his stash, to being so stupid as to go back to Texas with a bag of weed in his possession.

Of course it seems that this time, he has cleaned up his act, and is on the path to maybe making it past the age of 60. A good part of that success may be due to the infusion of beauty (and talent) into his life via the beautiful Allison Moorer, seen below.

Alison came on first, after an extremely orderly and well organized seating for the sell out crowd (at over $50 a seat). She played about 8 songs, most from her recent release of covers, appropriately called Mockingbird. A highlight was her version of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. Any Joni song is difficult to manage and she does so in an effortless manner. She did not sing Gillian Welch's Revelator, which is on the album.... I may need to find the disk now.

Steve came out shortly after her set, (long enough for people to take a short stretch) and played solid for about two and a half hours. It was truly a marathon, with the heat in the building. I was exhausted after the show, and Steve seemed pretty well OK with it. Maybe he really has cleaned up.

Here is a picture of what he looks like now. Quite the beard.

This was a great show, with some very cool turntable and electro-percussive work from a crew member that allowed some of the more urban sounds on his last couple of albums to be conveyed.

It was a show that will be difficult to match this year, one I don't think old Elton will come close to. Here we have a master of his form at the top of his game. To see him in a small acoustically great venue was wonderful. I can't see tired old Elton in the trashy Metro Centre coming close as a musical experience. Maybe as a spectacle, and we do know he has lots of those, right?

This musical couple continues their traveling road show in Ontario before heading south to their home and native land in the American Northeast. Of note, I'd recommend the 4 night stand at the Judson Memorial Church in New York from September 22 to 26.

Steve Earle in church? You betcha.

Commercial Free TV!

I broke down this past month and joined the big screen TV generation. I even did the painful work of getting it all set up so the sound could run through my stereo. So now I have a miniature movie theatre in the house.

We have not bothered with television for some time. No cable in 12 years, and that will stay. But the DVD rentals have usually been mostly L's doing, feeding her interest in the movie genre.

Meanwhile I have managed to remain almost gleefully ignorant of anything related to reality TV (nope, never seen more than a glimpse of Survivor, Dancing with the Stars, American or Canadian or Turkish Idol.)

But I have occasionally heard about television series that are a cut above the average. With real writers, and not the WWF level of entertainment offered by the "reality" series.

The first one that came into my sphere of awareness was Six Feet Under. OK, I liked that. Odd premise, but once you got invested in the characters, it worked as entertainment, and as a reason to sit down and get lost in for an hour or so an evening.

But now, with my newly pimped up AV delivery system, I can be even more rewarded when I indulge in this genre.

So, on a whim (after having had a few drinks) I bought the first season of Dexter. The show about the serial killer who has a code instilled in him by his adopted father (the Batman theme regurgitated, I know, but it still works). I watched Dexter knock off other killers who apparently deserved it more than he did for a week, and the season was over.

Now it is Veronica Mars, traded to me for Dexter. (I wonder how long I can continue trading series like this?) Again, not bad, if a bit cute, and sometimes (but not always) predictable. This show gives its rewards via the age old tenet of revenge. We all like it when bad people get what they deserve, even if it is at the hands of a smart ass little blonde who, in the real world, would have been put into hospital about 12 times by now, and I'm only half way through the season. (late edit - I was happy to see that finally someone did kick her biddy lil smart ass a bit).

Music concert videos are cool when it is loud, sounds good, and looks great! Not the same as being there, but there is no dope smoke, no puke on the stairs, and the beers only cost $2, plus they are real beers, not Lite anything, and the seats are comfy.

But the best part - no commercials. The only commercials I see any more are when the Cannes Awards clips come through town. And then there are so many, I forget 3/4 of them anyway.

Well, it is about time for another episode of Veronica. I am secretly hoping she is knocked off in the show - they do say these new series do things like that. But somehow, I doubt it will happen - her contract probably went past this season.

Now, if I could only buy a TV show as a pay per view every now and then (like The Masters) I'd be all set!

Wine of the Month - August, Jacob's Creek NV Chardonnay-Pinot Noir Brut Sparkling

This wine is hard to believe - it is so good for the money. The first time I had it, I was drinking a sparking wine and someone came up to me with a bottle of it and offered me some. I said, no, I'd stick with the stuff in my glass. Only to be told that that was what was IN my glass. Ooops. One geek stumped!

This is not really for the wine geek super snob, but you may make a fool of some of them if you serve it blind. And anyone who won't drink a cold glass of this on a hot day has issues.

$15.96 gets you some bready yeasty character, and some "real near-champagne-like" taste.

This is the one to have in the fridge for some zip to start a party, add to drinks for champagne martinis, add to fresh fruit, make Mimosas from, or to try to play stump the geek.

This year's version (it is a non-vintage (NV) offering, I believe) is very nice, but remember, next year may be a different thing.

So have your fun now.

Think Globally, Drink Locally

I have a tee shirt that says this on the back. I got it at the Bow and Arrow pub in Toronto. The beauty of it, of course, is that the message works pretty well everywhere you go.

Here in Halifax we have two very good micro-breweries and a couple of good brew pubs. There are now many different types of beer available fresh, in keg in our city. Any bar that has pretensions of sophistication must have a tap from one of these places. Period. There is no argument to parry this statement that holds water... or, er, beer.

Witness the Argyle Street scene. In comes the Carleton, with a lot of investment in fit-up, but they appear to have sold their "tap soul" to a major brewery. Not one decent beer on tap. Yet, at the same time, a more unexpected place to find a good beer on tap, perhaps, Seven Wine Bar, offers Propeller Bitter. Fizz, a new drinks place between the Subway and the Bitter End has not one decent beer available. And by decent I mean non-factory made beer. Yet next door at the Bitter End there is Garrison, at least one type, on tap.

The large factory brewers have one motivation - make a product that can be sold to as many people as possible and sell as much (in volume) as possible by whatever means. They regularly manage to provide bar owners with "incentives" to keep their beers on tap, and others' off the bar. This is Halifax's dirty little secret in the bar scene, a practice that is never regulated by the Province.

But when owners care about the quality of their wares, they choose differently. The best pub in town, Tom's Little Havana, has a suite of Garrison products. The Economy Shoe Shop and all its various affiliated licenses offer both Propeller and Garrison. Most places worth eating in the city have at least one of the local micros to drink.

There is no reason for a responsible Haligonian who wants to have a night out, need go to any place that does not support the local (as in true local, owned by Nova Scotians) beer business.

This analogy extends to wines. Again, many places are ignorant, so much so that if they have a Nova Scotian wine available, it is actually not made in Nova Scotia, or at least the grapes are not grown here. We now have so many decent quaffable wines at prices that can translate to affordable by the glass offerings in bars and restaurants, that there is no excuse for any place not to offer good Nova Scotia wine. Again, The Carleton falls flat on it face. But Fizz looks great, with the yummy strawberry accented Blomidon Rosé available by the glass. A perfect wine to sip while watching the street go by from their patio.

Most places with a trained Sommelier (not just someone who calls themself that) offer a number of different Nova Scotia wines. In fact, that may very well be the best way to identify a wine list that is professionally prepared in Nova Scotia. The losers have all the standard Australian best sellers at the NSLC with the big marketing budgets. Any place that you see, for example, Gaspereau Seyval Blanc on the list probably has a real Sommelier choosing the wines. Demonstrating an understanding of the local wines is one way for a restaurant to illustrate that it has an understanding of local food. Wine is food.

So, if you want to reinforce real local business with your spending, drink locally. When you are in Toronto, drink their beers and Niagara or Prince Edward County wines. In Montreal, drink their beers, and try Quebec wine (it can be good). And use the beer taps on the counter as a gauge of what to expect elsewhere in the place.

I vote with my palate. No reason you can't too.