Canadian Capers

Having flown frequently to Canada between 1976 and 2001, a period when I was invited to visit Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto and other places, mainly to hear music, see the modern arts centres, talk to Canadian critics, give lectures and meet friends,  I gained in the process a taste for Canadian food and wine.

Canada in the 1970s was on a cultural high. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa, a splendid culture complex near the lovely Rideau canal, set the standard.  There you could see opera and ballet (The Rite of Spring in my case), watch a play, eat in the excellent restaurant, browse in the well-stocked bookshop and sample all the things Ottawa, a pleasant city fringed by the picturesque Gatineau mountains, had to offer.

It was there that I had my first taste of Canadian wine, which some local connoisseurs spoke of somewhat dismissively, but which I thought rather good.  In Montreal I heard the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in its fine modern hall just before it visited Edinburgh with its controversial new conductor, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos. In Quebec’s new arts centre, somewhat smaller than Ottawa’s, I heard Sunday lunchtime chamber music and ate French-Canadian supper in the beautiful old town.

In  Guelph, town of many churches, I was invited by Nicky Goldschmidt, head of music, to lecture on Smetana and see productions of Britten’s Curlew River and and Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse.  In Toronto the shabby old Massey Hall had not yet been succeeded by the svelte new Roy Thomson Hall, financed by the Thomson Organisation, proprietors of The Scotsman, but it housed an impressive coupling of Beethoven’s Ninth and Stravinsky’s Agon conducted by Andrew Davis, former assistant conductor of the BBC SSO in Glasgow but by then in charge of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Canada, it struck me, was a stimulating place to be.

By the turn of the century, when Ottawa had launched a tremendous annual international festival of string quartets entitled Strings of the Future, it still seemed a good place. This event, now defunct, took place in the city’s fine new art gallery near the Ottawa River and contained, like the National Arts Centre, a good restaurant and bookshop.

Armed with my copy of Where to Eat Well in Canada, the equivalent of Britain’s now less interesting Good Food Guide, I was eating well everywhere I went.  And Canadian wine was steadily improving. Here in Britain the wine critic Jancis Robinson recently extolled a Top Fifty Canadian Wines and reported how much she had enjoyed sampling them. The only trouble was that few if any of them were available in Britain.

During the past week, however, my wife has been visited by a pair of convivial Canadian cousins, mother and daughter, from Ottawa, who stayed with us and brought two outstanding bottles as a gift. On this evidence, things had grown even better. The first, an Ontario Pinot Noir from the Henry of Pelham family estate, had a velvety depth of flavour of the sort we have come to associate with  leading New Zealand reds. The other, a fascinatingly reddish bitter-sweet Ice Wine, in an elegant bottle from the same estate, was the brightest, most intense of pudding wines, made from grapes frozen in the Canadian winter.

Neither of them is yet available here, but the producer it seems would be happy to export them.  At present his only outlet beyond North America is wine-conscious China.

To read Jancis Robinson’s survey of Canadian wine - entitled Canadian Wines Mature -  consult her own wonderfully comprehensive  website.  
30 October 2015