John Schreiner’s most recent work, The Wines of Canada ($39.95 hardcover), is a 307-page survey of Canadian wines, including fruit wines and ciders. Remarkably, there are land-based wineries in every province except Alberta. There are a rapidly growing number of vineyard-based wineries in Ontario, British Columbia, Québec and Nova Scotia. Schreiner provides thumbnail sketches, and often detailed profiles, of the majority of producers in Canada, with winery ratings for the grape wineries.
Schreiner anchors the profiles with a lively overview chapter on the general history of the industry and on the history of each wine region. He also provides a chapter of Icewine, the best known Canadian wine style internationally; and he has included a chapter-length profile of Vincor International Inc., the first Canadian wine company to acquire wineries in other major wine regions around the world.
Schreiner acknowledges the dubious beginnings of the Canadian wine industry. However, the profiles and the winery ratings provide plenty of evidence that today’s industry ranks with its peers in the New World and is taken seriously in the Old World.
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