Quebec wine routes

This young but rapidly growing winemaking region in southeastern Canada is a bucolic wonderland of gourmet farm-to-table restaurants, inventive distilleries and welcoming cellar doors

- BRIDGET MCGROUTHER

When I told friends and family that we were travelling to Quebec, to share the driving and tasting along the region’s Routes des Vins (‘wine routes’ – see box, p77), they looked surprised. Wine in Quebec? Who knew? Even the perplexed Canadian immigration officer suggested we should have visited France instead!

Yet in the French-speaking La Belle Province, proud of its roots and joie de vivre, it’s perhaps unsurprising that wineries (‘vignobles’ locally) have been blossoming over the past 45 years – as have the resulting wine routes to tour by car, bike, taxi or on foot (depending how much you want to taste). Dunham in the Eastern Townships (Cantonsde-l’Est) southeast of Montreal was the birthplace of wine-growing in Quebec in 1979 – although it wasn’t until 1985 that winemakers could legally sell their wine. The Conseil des vins du Québec now lists nine wine-growing regions with 165 wineries producing more than three million bottles annually from at least 80 grape varieties, mainly hybrids, but increasingly Vitis vinifera.

The recent boom has coincided with climate change and consequent warming temperatures in a region formerly more famous for Icewine. While Okanagan Valley in British Columbia and Niagara, southern Ontario, are typically most associated with vineyards in Canada, Quebec now boasts one of the country’s fastest-growing wine-producing areas. Quantity isn’t everything, though, and if it’s quality you’re after, then you’ll definitely find it in Québécois boutique wineries, many of which are just a joy to behold. Quebec’s winemakers are enterprising and experimental, combining traditional and modern techniques and more readily embracing an organic approach.

Sleepy villages