Vine Social: A Look at Why It’s Impossible to Find Most Canadian Wines in the United States

I’ve spent an unacceptable amount of time in Canada over the last month. Given how gorgeous it is here in our desert paradise this time of year, getting on a plane to travel to the Great White North just feels wrong.

The good news is my trips to Canada were wine- and family-related, which makes snow flurries and freezing rain somewhat more tolerable.

My first trip was to the Vancouver International Wine Festival, where I sipped and spit copious amounts of Italian and Canadian wines, ate like a queen in some of the city’s finest restaurants, and got to know the awesome team behind my business partners’ Canadian operation.

Just a short week later, I was back in Canada, this time in my home city of Calgary, Alberta, to help my father move into his new home.

Both trips had me drinking wine from the Okanagan region of British Columbia—and thinking about why these wines are not available in the United States.

Luckily, on both trips, I was surrounded by wine-industry folks and had the opportunity to ask some probing questions. I was able to address some of the very questions our snowbirds ask me every season.

“Are there any Canadian wines here beyond ice wine?”

“Do you have any wines from B.C.?”

“Why can’t I get any B.C. wines here in California?”

In Vancouver, the answers I received were varied—and more than a little vague. Some people said the wines are simply too limited. There only about 9,000 acres of vines planted in the wine valleys of the Okanagan, and as a result, the majority of the high-end wines produced in the region stay in the country.

Others explained that importing Canadian wines into the U.S. was simply too difficult: There are too many rules and hoops to jump through, and at the end of the day, selling wine in the United States just wasn’t worth it.

One winery owner said, quite plainly, that the United States isn’t ready to pay for the quality of wine that the Okanagan is producing. He claimed the wines of Canada are fully capable of going head-to-head with some of California’s finest wines, but Americans aren’t prepared to pay the same price or higher for luxury Canadian wines. His wines sell out every year, he said, so why go to the trouble of finding someone to import his wines, and then shell out massive dollars to market the wines to a group of consumers who don’t want them anyway?

These answers made me scratch my head in disbelief. The United States is now the leading consumer of wine in the world, surpassing France and Italy. The U.S. successfully imports and imbibes wine from virtually every wine-producing region in the world. In my little wine shop here in La Quinta, I have wines from countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Hungary, Corsica, Sardinia and Tasmania, just to name a few. Even lesser-known domestic wine regions like the Finger Lakes in New York, or the wine regions of Virginia, have a place on my shelves. Not only are these wines represented in my shop; they are some of my best-sellers.

So why would our neighbors to the north think the U.S. isn’t a viable market for their wines? Why would they discount the fact that so many of their residents flock to our desert for 180 days each year? It just didn’t make sense to me.

Then I had an eye-opening lunch with some of my comrades who run my business partners’ liquor stores in British Columbia. Their boots-on-the-ground insight helped me put some of the pieces together.

Some of the above-mentioned reasons are probably valid, especially for some of the smaller production wineries—but that’s not the crux of it. What is: the level of control the provincial government has over the alcohol trade in British Columbia, which I found upsetting and frustrating.

I’m from Alberta, where liquor sales have been privatized—meaning the sales and ordering of all alcohol is handled exclusively by independent retailers and restaurants—since 1993. I’ve taken for granted the fact that every time I’m in Calgary, I can walk into any little wine shop and find a wonderful selection of wines that come from every corner of the globe, at relatively competitive prices. I wasn’t familiar with just how invasive the other provinces’ liquor-control boards are.

In other provinces, like British Columbia, the liquor-control board controls every aspect of what wines and spirits can come into the province. They also mandate the pricing and availability based on what they supply in their own provincially run stores. Yup: Not only do they have control over the “privately owned” liquor stores in their province; they also have their own provincially run stores that directly compete with the independently owned stores.

Some of my comrades told me that the provincial government will go so far as to market and promote items they feature in their stores as a way to undercut their smaller, privately owned competitors. If a wine is presented to the B.C. market, the liquor-control board can make the arbitrary decision to withhold that product from other shops and keep it all for their-government run stores. They can control pricing and distribution, effectively prohibiting smaller retailers from any kind of competitive sales. They even run advertisements highlighting the advantages of shopping at the provincial stores over the “mom and pop” shops.

When I asked if anything could be done—like some kind of ballot initiative, protest or coup—the group kind of collectively laughed at me: “Oh, Katie, you silly American and your freedoms.” The answer was a resounding no. Apparently the corruption runs so deep that people in the private liquor-sales sector in provinces outside of Alberta have just thrown up their hands in defeat. “It is what it is,” I was told. “Nothing is going to change. The B.C. liquor board is never going to relinquish control when their operation is such a cash cow.”

I find myself shaking my head in disbelief. Needless to say, I’m happy to be home, and at the end of the day, I’m lucky I get to be the master of my wine ship. I have the ability to select the wines I want to sell, that I stand behind, and that I’m passionate about.

It would be wonderful to have wines from British Columbia on my shelves. There are several that I have really enjoyed, and it would be a joy to introduce them to our local wine-lovers. But until British Columbia gets out of its own way and realizes that the United States is a wine force to be reckoned with, their wines will have stay behind their self-imposed iron curtain.