Canada

Canada is a big country with a small wine industry, and, for many years, its wines were little known internationally. The exception was Icewine, the supersweet wine that, beginning in the 1990s, became a successful export, especially in China. These days, quality Canadian table wines are popular on the domestic market, and they are increasingly appearing on wine lists throughout the world.

Canada is one of the youngest winemaking countries in the Americas, but, paradoxically, it is possible that the very first wine in this part of the world was made there. Around 1000 CE, the Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson reached the east coast of present-day Canada, and one of his crew, a German from a wine-producing region, recognized grapevines growing wild. Eriksson named the area Vinland, and he established a winter camp there. The location was probably in what is now Quebec, on the north shore of the Gaspé Peninsula, which is the south shore of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. It seems likely that Eriksson’s crew, having exhausted the beer they brought with them, tried to make wine from the grapes.

Although elements of the story are debated by historians and archeologists, it is intriguing as the possible beginnings of wine production in Canada. There is no evidence that Canada’s Indigenous peoples made wine or other alcoholic beverages, and winemaking was not resumed until other Europeans arrived and settled in the eastern regions in the 1600s.

But just before that time, in 1535, in an echo of Leif Eriksson’s journey, the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River and encountered an island where wild grapevines were growing up trees. He first named it the Île de Bacchus, after the Roman god of wine, but then more strategically renamed it the Île d’Orléans after his patron, the duke