THE PALE DRY TRUTH
Selling fortified wine to the homeless
Brights Pale Dry Select does not often appear on lists of recommended wines in magazines. It is scarcely lauded by critics, rarely endorsed by aficionados and regularly overlooked by awards bodies. Most serious wine drinkers, I expect, have no idea it exists. But in its own unlikely way Brights Pale Dry Select is ubiquitous in this country — as much a fixture of our national diet of drink as the beloved Caesar. We simply don’t hear about it, because Brights Pale Dry Select happens to be enjoyed almost exclusively by the homeless.
In the summer of 2006 I took a job as a part- time sales clerk at Wine Rack, the retail division of Constellation Brands Canada, which owns a number of Niagarabased wineries, including Inniskillin, Jackson-Triggs and Naked Grape, among others, and which sells these wines in cities throughout Ontario from stand- alone shops and boutiques barnacled to grocery stores. I learned about Pale Dry Select on my first day. Pale Dry Select, I was i nformed, was the Wine Rack’s most popular item by far: our tiny outlet on Elgin street in Ottawa sold several dozen bottles of the stuff every day, each one to the visibly destitute.
Our homeless clientele — regulars who lived on or around Elgin, mainly, and who would shop with us two or three times between when we opened mid-morning and closed late at night — would drink nothing but Pale Dry. Nobody else even looked at it. So entrenched was this routine that if someone who did not appear to be homeless came in and asked for Pale Dry Select we were instructed to refuse them, because ordinarily this meant a homeless customer who had been denied service previously had asked for it to be bought on their behalf. We kept it out of sight but within reach. Our supplies were replenished constantly. Not once in the time I worked at Wine Rack did I sell a bottle of Pale Dry Select for anything other than a handful of loose change.
Pale Dry Select is acrid and odious. It is pale amber in complexion and so intensely pungent that the room winces the very moment you unscrew the plastic lid. It is, by any reasonable standard, undrinkable. But it isn’t difficult to understand the appeal.
A 750ml bottle of Pale Dry Select retails for $8.95 at the Wine Rack and the LCBO in Ontario. As a fortified wine, it is 20% ABV, which makes it the strongest drink available in that quantity at that price point in the country — the absolute lowest end of what’s technically legal. There is, in other words, no cheaper way to get drunk in Canada. If every nickel you have is precious, why squander another dollar for the luxury of a better-tasting wine?
The drink’s provenance i s somewhat mysterious. Brights, the brand label, has a substantive history as T. G. Bright & Company, founded in 1874 in the Niagara region and remains the “second-oldest continuously operating winery in Canada,” according to the Wines of Canada website. It originated at a period when the country produced ports and sherries exclusively. Brights merged with Inniskillin and Cartier Wines to become Vincor in the early 1990s; Vincor was in turn acquired by Constellation a decade on. The Brights name survives only in the form of Pale Dry Select and a handful of other inexpensive fortified wines, including Brights Classic Cream and Brights 74 Tawny. Its profile online is negligible. Constellation does not list any of the Brights products on its official website. A Wikipedia article for Brights Pale Dry Select was removed for non-notability.
When approached f or comment, a representative for Constellation Brands insisted that Pale Dry Select customers “often use it within cooking or baking.” They went on to explain that over the last four to five years Pale Dry and other fortified wines have been gradually phased out of circulation from Wine Rack street stores, and are today available exclusively at “select Wine Rack stores only situated within grocery stores or in malls” and at the LCBO. Though this is not, they say, because of concerns about its use or most-regular users: they explain that the reason for its removal “is largely around local demographics and declining fortified wine sales.”
Still, one wonders at the ethics of such a beverage. To what extent is a manufacturer responsible for its own demographic? Certainly the nation’s homeless alcoholics, were Pale Dry Select unavailable or marginally more expensive, would elect to drink another brand — and a person intent to make themselves drunk cheaply will, no matter what, find a way. And of course all alcohol — no less than the culture that permits and encourages its consumption — shares in the blame for the ease and tenacity of alcoholism. Given the system, it’s hard to argue that any one brand of alcohol in particular is doing something devious or immoral.
However, I’m not sure uniquely affordable alcohol of such a high percentage is comparable to, say, a discount beer- brand or cheap vodka — both of which tend to be bought and relished by undiscerning college stu- dents or revellers on a tight budget. The audience for this — beyond those looking for an inexpensive dash of flavour in their cooking — is disconcertingly defined as the country’s most imperilled.