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Dan Aykroyd’s Niagara CrushFrancis Ford Coppola focused on Napa. Greg Norman scored in Australia. Can one of Canada’s favourite comedians make the world take our wine seriously?
There’s a TV commercial that ran in the late 1980s for Roots, the beaver-logoed clothing purveyor. It shows a tranquil summer scene on a lake in the Canadian wilderness. A canoe with two paddlers cuts through the placid waters. A loon calls. A bone-dry voice-over extols: “There have always been mornings like these in Algonquin Park.” The narrator lists the qualities that make Roots unequivocally Canadian and, with a final loon call, the canoe disappears around a point. The voice is unmistakably Dan Aykroyd, delivered in that deadpan monotone he made famous as the black-suited, sunglasses-wearing Elwood Blues in the 1980 blockbuster. Cut to the summer of 2006. The Blues Brother and sometime Ghost Buster sits at the end of a dock in the Ontario wilderness, his back to perfectly calm waters. Some ducks mill about and the occasional fish rises to snag an unfortunate fly. Aykroyd looks around, grinning, taking in the peace. “This is called one lucky mo-fo,” he says, almost to himself. He toasts the moment with a glass of red wine – his own red wine. A few months earlier, sight unseen, Aykroyd sunk a cool million into Ontario’s burgeoning wine industry, and he’s come here, to EastDell Estates, to eyeball his investment. Trading sunglasses for wineglasses, Aykroyd is taking on his latest role – self-appointed – as Canada’s Wine Am-bassador. “People like to have a figure they can relate to. They can say, ‘Here’s a guy who’s had some relative success. He’s not going to be drinking plonk.’” Earlier this year, Aykroyd invested $1-million in Diamond Estates Wines & Spirits, a small but rapidly expanding holding company that owns four of the region’s wineries. The fierce patriot with a weak spot for cottage country says he wants to raise awareness of the wines of his native land, which, given that Canada isn’t even a blip’s blip on the international wine stage, is a whole lot harder than wearing a flag, toting a two-four and yelling, “I am Canadian!” This winter, a line of Dan Aykroyd wines will hit the shelves at home and abroad. Even so, this is the actor’s first visit to the booming wine region and, truth be told, his taste for Canadian wine is still a work in progress. Aykroyd’s more of a Napa man and a fan of the big reds of Bordeaux. But he expects his palate to follow. “My entry into this business is well timed because I love reds,” he says, “and the reds here are really starting to feel their maturity.” It was touring with the Blues Brothers that first brought Aykroyd in contact with premium wine and that sparked an infatuation with life’s finer things. “In L.A. one night, opening for Steve Martin, guitarist Steve Cropper busted out part of his little collection. I grew up in Ottawa, and Mateus Rosé was a big night out for me. Steve Cropper started to turn me on to these big beautiful Napa and Sonoma cabernets. And he’d say, well, it all originates from Bordeaux and Margaux. And my wife and I discovered the Brane-Cantenac Margaux and the Pichon Lalande.” This is about as serious as Aykroyd will get talking about wine. Then the jokester kicks in. “Anything with a ‘Saint’ in it, I found, was good, like Saint-Émilion, and anything with an ‘x’, like Margaux. Anything with an ‘x’ or a ‘Saint’ is going to have a nice bold, mixed flavour.” |
