In all honesty, if Florida became part of Canada I’d stay. Not moving anywhere cold, though.
Depends on your experience with wine. Most people? Probably not. I am not a licensed sommelier, but I can guarantee you I could tell the difference between a cab or chard produced in Napa vs Ontario. I’m not even sure you could successfully produce either of those wines in Ontario.
Also, getting back to whether, it’s also ridiculous to just compare latitudes, since the northern population centers in CA (I’m talking Humbolt County) are on the coast, not inland. The coast, of course, has a moderating effect on temperature. No one in his right mind would suggest that Michigan weather was comparable to CA weather, no matter how north in CA one goes (unless you’re in the mountains). And that’s what Ontario is-- right next to Michigan.
That attitude is simply out of date.
When I was growing up, Ontario wine was, rightly, regarded as uniformly bad.
Things have changed.
Now, I regularly drink high-quality Ontario wines, they are as good as anything produced in California - which I also drink from time to time.
They aren’t the same, but they are not inferior, any more. The trick is to use varieties of grapes that are suitable to local conditions, it appears.
As for the weather - in Toronto at least, it does indeed suck.
But the fact is that life in the US and Canada is, for most people at least, not a hell of a lot different.
In my experience, people do move - to follow professional or romantic goals. Not because of politics of weather.
Of my two brothers, one moved to Iowa to take an academic post; one moved to England, to marry an Englishwoman; and I stayed in Toronto.
I agree that comparing latitudes makes no sense. When I was visiting England, I did the “comparing lattitudes” thing - and where I was staying was the same lattitude as James Bay! :eek:
Despite that fact, there was a distinct lack of iceburgs and polar bears …
Even sommeliers can’t tell the difference. Every honest study done into the matters shows it’s pretty much random. So-called experts can’t tell one region from the other or cheap wine from good without reading the label.
I’d put a thousand dollars that in a blind taste test, anyone would fail to distinguish between California or Ontario wines.
And yeah, it’s true of craft beers, too.
Anyone familiar with California would know this just by driving from an inland city to San Francisco. A thirty minute drive can drop the temperature from “pretty hot” to “Jesus, where’s my sweater?”
Indeed, Toronto is roughly on the same latitude as Marseilles. The weather is, uh, rather strikingly different. Winnipeg is south of London, England, but is approximately fifty million times colder.
Only from September to June.
I’ll be very interested in discussing that with you in another thread. I know that I can tell Pinots from Santa Lucia Highlands (one appellation in CA). I’ve done it in blind tastings.
Not many. The first clue was my use of the phrase “much of which is uninhabited” and also “but almost all major Canadian population centers are towards the southern end”. I don’t dispute that point.
It may be for many. Personally I love both winter and summer, for entirely different reasons. I love the real, significant change in seasons. Summer is wonderful and hot and lots of people have backyard swimming pools, but there’s also something wonderful about the nip in the air that says that fall is coming, about sitting in front of the fire with a hot rum or cider with the snow falling outside and the whole world a silent and pristeen white. There’s something about that that is good for the soul.
There’s also an interesting phenomenon that should be the subject of a different discussion – the fact that there seems to be a correlation between cool climates and progressive society. Look at northern Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, the US northeast and northwest. Then look at the southern US states (excepting California), Africa, and Central America. The correlation isn’t perfect but it’s pretty strong.
As Malthus already said, that attitude is out of date (by decades!). He gave you some links. Here are some others. The guys at Vinexpo, arguably the world’s top wine competition in Bordeaux, weren’t laughing when they gave an Ontario wine one of their top awards. Lots of other international awards for Ontario wines are mentioned here.
The real problem with Ontario wines is not the lack of excellence, it’s the fact that the exceptionally good ones are quite expensive. Sadly, they’re not cheaper than California or French or Australian wines just because they’re local.
You certainly could, and they do, and very successfully, too. Originally cold-climate varietals like Cab Franc were the most common, and are still produced in quantity, but improvements in cultivation – and a warming climate – have produced a lot of new ones.
I’m on the fence about whether one could necessarily tell the difference between a Canadian and a California identical varietal. All wine regions tend to have their own characteristics, but there are always outliers and unique varietals and vintages. I could probably identify a region given a significant wine sampling, but possibly not from a single wine or comparison of a pair. It’s more a rule of thumb. Canadian cabs tend to have a firmness about them, California cabs often exhibit the robust depth so beloved by Robert Parker (and me), French cabs tend toward understated subtlety.
One effect that this would have would be to effectively reduce the overall immigration restrictions for the United states to that of Canada. While you may not have too many native born Canadians picking up and moving to the US, you may have Chinese immigrating to Canada and then moving and working in the US.
Missed edit window: in the last section of the previous post, when I refer to “Canadian” varietal or cab, substitute “Ontario”, and more specifically, the wines of Niagara Escarpment region that I’m most familiar with. Just saying “Canadian cab” is of course meaningless.
Icewine. Yes, I can believe they make some good Icewine.
As for the rest, come back when there is a taste comparison between Ridge Monte Bello (not Napa, but Santa Clara County) or Stags Leap or Silver Oak or some specific, excellent cabernet from one of CA’s viticultural regions. There is no indication of which wines were including in the tastings.
Come, come. This is quibbling.
It is well known that Ontario wines used to be gawd-awful. Your original post reflects that - a couple of decades ago, it would indeed have been laughable and “frankly ridiculous” to claim Ontario wines (any of 'em) could stand up to good wines from California.
This simply isn’t true any more. There are wines from Ontario on the same level.
Now, it may be that you could pick out some specific wine and claim no Ontario wine is as good as that. At the top level, tastes vary. I just don’t think, on any objective measure, that anyone serious about wine would claim (any more) that it is “laughable” to compare really good Ontario wines to any others in the world, or that Ontario is unsuitable as a place to produce really great wines.
To my mind, this is a good thing - it means that there is another great wine-growing territory in the world - though, admittedly, the actual area in Ontario suitable for wine-growing is very small, in comparison; and of course one cannot count ice-wine - it’s really a specialty only producable in some places, like Ontario and Germany.