If you were polled about being able to buy wine in grocery stores, I’m betting there’s a good chance you’d say "yes please". The convenience is just too seductive. Imagine picking up all of your fixings for dinner and an inexpensive bottle of delicious wine at the same time.
I hate to burst your bubble, but it isn’t going to happen the way you think.
Despite the announcement that supermarkets will be able to sell wine on their shelves as of April 1, bottles aren’t going to magically start appearing in each and every grocery store. In fact, a limited amount of licenses will be granted on a lottery basis according to a number of convoluted regulations announced Feb 26. You can check out WineLaw.ca if you care to wade through these.
The policies are such that you can probably forget about there being such a store in Vancouver. Reportedly only two stores comply with provincial guidelines but apparently these are across from a church so Vancouver bylaws won’t allow this.
You could try driving to another municipality for this ‘convenience’. Even there, you’ll actually need to find a supermarket that possesses one of these lottery licenses. And, if you have a hankering for something from France, California, Australia or anything else that isn’t from BC, you’ll be required to go to a separate part of the store (essentially a store-within-a-store) and pay for your wine at a separate till before or after purchasing the rest of your groceries. Do I sense your frustration is building?
But wait, an exception has been made for 100 per cent BC wine. Somewhere between the soup and pasta aisles, you might find an oasis of bottles from our local vineyards. Although this won’t happen in those grocery stores that already have a store-within-a-store. You’ll need to find another supermarket that offers this. And don’t expect rock bottom prices. Supermarkets south of the border focus on large volume brands and are able to grind down producers in order to achieve astronomically low prices. Our homegrown wine isn’t cheap to begin with and most of our wineries craft wine on a small scale. Very few wineries are in the position to play the supermarket pricing game.
Singling out BC wine for sale on regular supermarket shelves may seem advantageous for our local industry. However, it is highly possible that this overt preferential treatment will come under international scrutiny. While BC Wine Institute CEO Miles Prodan claims that allowing BC wine exclusively on grocery store shelves does not violate any international trade agreements, wine lawyer Mark Hicken disagrees.
Preferential treatment for BC wine was granted under NAFTA for only a small number of stores that existed as of Nov 1987. These are the free standing VQA stores. According to Hicken this simply wouldn’t be extended to wine sold on regular supermarket shelves; “That is just too dramatic a difference in the retail distribution channel and I just don’t think that there is any way that that would survive a trade agreement challenge.”
And if this issue is challenged, it could open up a whole can of worms. BC wine enjoys a few other advantages over international wine that would be subjected to review as well.
Food for thought indeed.
It remains to be seen how all the changes will play out. More revisions along the way are highly likely. We’ll have to wait until after April 1 to see who’s been made a fool of.
