How our wine gets pushed into foreign markets
TRADE COMMISSIONER A SECRET WEAPON IN PROMOTING OUR PRODUCT TO THE WORLD
The belle of the ball thrown by Canada for the King and Queen of Sweden almost missed the menu. Gov. Gen. David Johnston and his wife Sharon hosted an official dinner — the Friends of Canada Reception — during their state visit to Sweden last month. It was given at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, Scandinavia’s most-visited museum.
King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of the Swedish Royal Family and 400 guests joined the Johnstons at the museum for a menu highlighting Canadian and Swedish dishes. Swedish beer-and-brown-butter stewed lentils and spinach would be served alongside Salt Spring Island goat cheese and walnuts.
What to drink with all that? Canadian wine, of course.
The eight wines served with the seven courses prepared by Rideau Hall chef Louis Charest were all from Canada, and one of these — the 2013 Merlot made by Penticton, B.C.’s Painted Rock Estate winery — knocked the socks off Swedish palates accustomed to vintages from Germany, France, Spain and Italy, according to Can- adian officials in attendance.
John Skinner, the proprietor of Painted Rock, could hardly contain his excitement when he heard the news.
“Wow! Oh my god. I’m so excited to hear this!” Skinner enthused when a reporter reached him by phone while he was on holidays in Mexico.
The Merlot — the winery sells it for about $35 a bottle — was not the first choice of the Canadian government official who made the wine recommendations for the Rideau Hall-designed menu. The official thought the Syrah made by Skinner’s Painted Rock winery, not its Merlot, would be best to pair with a course consisting of Herrgardsost raclette, Acadian spice-rubbed Alberta beef tenderloin and fingerling potatoes.
But there are no hard and fast rules about wine pairings, and Skinner wanted to show off the Merlot. So the Merlot it would be, and it became the belle of the ball.
The official who had fingered Painted Rock as one of the wineries that would be featured works at Global Affairs Canada — the department formerly known as Foreign Affairs — as part of the chief trade commissioner’s international business development, investment and innovation sector. Her formal title is Trade Commissioner, Canadian Wine, Beer and Spirits and Tourism. Her name is Janet Dorozynski, and she is one of Canada’s secret weapons in the country’s $7-billion-ayear wine industry.
“Janet is, in my book, a star,” said Skinner. “Her mandate is to find people like me and open doors and make things happen.”
That’s what Dorozynski has been doing for nearly 15 years as Canada’s top wine diplomat. And the Stockholm dinner was just another example of the federal government’s wine diplomacy that has helped double Canadian wine exports over the past four years.
Indeed, in all of Scandinavia, Canadian wines are pretty much non-existent. Meanwhile, wineries from Oregon alone posted US$44million worth of sales last year in Scandinavia.
Skinner, when he learned of that fact, phoned Dorozynski to tell her he and others were prepared to change that. The Stockholm dinner is the first step to what the industry hopes will be millions of dollars in new export sales.
“It’s an absolute target market for us,” said Skinner. “It’s a strong currency. They know and like wine. They like Canada. There’s never been a better opportunity.”
It was also an example of a smart Canadian trade initiative to use governors general, prime ministers, premiers and diplomats to push Canadian booze into foreign markets and create new jobs
and prosperity back home.
In 2016, Canada exported 71 million litres of wine worth a combined $80 million. Four years ago, it was 26.2 million litres worth a combined $41 million.
With the Stockholm dinner, the ultimate goal was to get the Swedish state liquor monopoly to consider adding the Canadian wines to its product list.
“When the wines end up on the table in front of the King and Queen of Sweden — and the monopoly is there — it opens the door because I’m going to be reaching out to the monopoly to start a conversation about them adding my wines,” said Charles Baker, marketing director for Stratus Vineyards of Niagaraon-the-Lake, Ont.
The Stratus 2012 Red, a blend of several varietals that sells for about $45 a bottle in Ontario liquor stores, was served with the cheese and it too was a big hit.
Dorozynski also picked a winery that was sure to be a
conversation-starter among the guests. That winery was the Old Third Winery in Prince Edward County, Ont., run by Bruno Francois and Jens Korberg, a Swedish emigre who once met the King and Queen of Sweden when they visited Canada several years ago.
That was a good enough hook for Dorozynski to put Old Third’s 2015 Pinot Noir on the menu. Old Third is a small winery, producing about 1,000 cases a year from grapes grown on its estate, and it had long sold out of its 2015 Pinot Noir. But Korberg and Francois said they were happy to dig up a few cases out of their “library” to serve at the dinner.
Dorozynski is the one and only trade commissioner Canada has ever had who does this job, and she’s pretty much the only bureaucrat of her kind in the world. The job was established in 2004, after then-governor general Adrienne Clarkson and her husband, John Ralston Saul, both wine fans, were puzzled as to why they were not able to showcase and serve Canadian wines when they travelled overseas to state functions.
With the encouragement of Rideau Hall, foreign affairs officials established what would become the Canadian Wine Initiative (CWI) and Dorozynski became the key bureaucrat behind it.
Her first task back in 2004 was to build a global distribution system so that all foreign missions could choose from a variety of Canadian wineries — small, medium and large.
“It was quite — I think — forward-thinking at the time to do something like this. I know (Canada’s diplomatic) posts like it and appreciate it,” Dorozynski said during a recent interview in Ottawa.
Dorozynski is a certified wine expert and, though she doesn’t like to be called the government’s sommelier, that’s what she does: providing detailed guidance and expertise to diplomats about vintages available, answering questions about wine markets, and, where appropriate, making recommendations.
“I would not a recommend a wine if I had not tasted it,” Dorozynski said. “I’m a professional. It’s not about what I like. It’s about what will fit with the menu, what the producer wants to showcase, how it fits in with the event.”
While her goal is certainly to please the palates of presidents and kings and queens, trade is her top priority. This dovetails with two other government objectives: to get small businesses into export markets and to diversify export markets away from the U.S.
“Many of the wines that we serve at these events are from small companies and first-time exporters, people looking to export, people wanting to get their wine out there. They don’t have the capacity to send three cases of wine to an event on their own, so that’s where we come in,” Dorozynski said.
Says Baker of Stratus Vineyards: “It’s great that when you do go to Paris, you’re drinking our wine. The department has done a great job to set up the infrastructure to get us there.”
QUITE FORWARD-THINKING TO DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS.