Mike Macquisten (left), Steve Thorp and Kelly Symonds meet over a glass of wine at the taps at the Vancouver Urban Winery on Dunlevy in Vancouver.
Photograph by: Ric Ernst , PNG
If you’re offered wine on tap at a restaurant, take my advice. Don’t sneer, don’t condescend.
Just like screw tops, wine on tap is becoming serious business — that is, for mid-range wines that don’t require aging.
It’s all the rage in the U.S., and Vancouver is clambering on board. At Edible Canada on Granville Island, the wine on tap (from Nichol Winery in Naramata), is fresher and more aromatic than its bottled equivalent, according to owner Eric Pateman.
And now, two young Vancouverites have started a business to package keg wines, taking the concept to an intrigued market. Their company, Vancouver Urban Winery, is the first in Canada to ‘keg’ bulk wines for bars, hotels and restaurants. That is, they pump finished wines from tanks into kegs and nitrogen guards against oxygenation. It’s ready to be served by the glass, on tap, and it keeps fresh for a long time.
Principals Mike Macquisten and Steve Thorp took over a too-cool space on Dunlevy St. to launch this pioneering business. Their primary focus is packaging wines in kegs for wineries to sell to restaurants and bars. But they’re also kegging their own wine, too, under the brand name Nice Catch. So far, they’ve kegged 22,000 litres of bulk New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and it’s ready to go; it’s available for tastings at their facility and they’re waiting for restaurants and bars to catch up with taps to match. In two weeks, they’ll be receiving Chilean Malbec which they’ll also keg. They’ll keep an eye on demand before adding more wines to Nice Catch.
Vancouver Urban Winery is also a spacious venue for events (weddings, music, corporate events, parties, a quick game of hockey when the owners are restive) and for tap wine tastings to convert skeptics (winemakers, their reps, sommeliers, restaurateurs, the public) into fans.
“We’re pioneering wine on tap in Canada,” says Thorp, who shuns the term ‘draft wine.’ “They’ve been packaging wine this way in Europe for decades.” Like similar companies in the U.S., Vancouver Urban Winery doesn’t want consumer perception to associate keg wine with boxed wines. Food & Wine magazine selected a wine kegging company in the U.S. as one of the ‘best wine trends of 2010.’
In the U.S. in the past three years, wine on tap has gone mainstream. Even Daniel Boulud serves it in his casual restaurant, DBGB. Vancouver Urban Winery’s U.S. strategic partner, Flow Wines, has packaging contracts for tap wine with more than 50 big wineries in 35 states. “Wineries are now able to put better quality wines on tap because there’s no risk of it ever spoiling,” says Thorp.
Actually, at Lupo Italian restaurant, staff have been serving the Italian bubbly, Prosecco, on tap for some time. There’s always been big demand for it and customers can order it by the glass. Co-owner Michael Mameli was on a beach in Italy in 2009 when he was gobsmacked to see an ice cream vendor selling Prosecco on tap from his cart. When he returned to Vancouver, he made arrangements to bring some in.
“It doesn’t have the romance of opening a bottle at the table but when you’re going through three, four cases of Prosecco a week, you’re dealing with 45, 50 glass bottles. We’re no longer shipping that extra weight from Europe,” says Mameli.
When Edible Canada bistro opened on Granville Island last summer, Pateman built in wine taps. “Demand was way beyond what we expected,” says Pateman. “We thought we had enough tap wine to last six months. It was gone in eight weeks. It’s partly the green thing, partly curiosity but the flavour is far better than out of the bottle. It holds the freshness — I’m not a scientist but we’ve done tastings from the bottle and out of the keg. It’s more sustainable, it’s a better product and we save a bit of money.”
Pateman says the Nichol wines on tap are the least costly on the bistro’s by-the-glass list. One of them, a blend called 9 Mile — took an ‘Unsung Hero’ nod at a Vancouver Magazine food and wine event last year. “We save a bit and we pass some on to the consumer,” says Pateman. The keg wine is about 12- to 15-per-cent cheaper than its bottled equivalent, he says.
Matthew Sherlock, director of sales and marketing at Nichol, says its kegged wines are “more effusive and bright and fresh” than the bottled; the winery is so pleased with the kegged wines that it has developed a brand especially for kegging, called Clean Slate.
Nichol Winery initially kegged some of its wines manually for a restaurant in Naramata and for Edible Canada bistro. When Vancouver Urban Winery came on the scene, it became a client. “We took an 800-litre stainless steel tank and put it on the back of our truck and delivered it to them,” says Sherlock. “Factoring everything in [bottling, labelling, labour, transport], it saves us about 15 per cent. That’s huge! We can put four times as much wine on the same pallet.
“I’ve no concerns about the flavour. It doesn’t go through the bottle shock which mutes the aromatics. There’s consistency of quality, there are no cork issues or random oxidation or storage issues. The real barrier is people can’t believe it. They have to taste it. Major cities in the U.S. are about five years ahead of us in terms of a more progressive wine culture. In the U.S., it’s massive,” he says.
Vancouver Urban Winery’s winemaker Kelly Symonds Mean, whose job is quality control of the finished wines delivered in bulk from wineries, says: “The longer you’re in the wine business, you lose the romance and see the practicality.
“Our goal is to keg moderately priced, good quality wines.” She says the company’s system can fill 20 kegs in less than 15 minutes.
“As winemakers, we craft the perfect product and then we put them through filters and on bottling lines and put porous corks in the bottles. There’s exposure to oxygen and to expect the wine to be exactly the way we made it is challenging. Then at the restaurant level, we can never be sure of what they’re doing. If a wine is spoiled, the winery is the first to be blamed when it could be a number of things — the cork, the handling, the storage — it’s out of our control. The idea of bulk packaging is sounder than bottles. It’s always been well-known that wine ages better in a larger format,” she says. “I’m absolutely a fan of wine on tap.”
Restaurants are keen to sell wines by the glass because stricter drinking and driving laws have been cutting into the sales of bottles of wine. “They’re moving heavily into wine-by-the-glass market. It’s where they’re making money,” says Symonds Mean. Kegged wine is more efficient for inventory control; staff don’t have to keep restocking shelves and dealing with partial bottles and empties and of course, there’s no spoilage, as happens with opened bottles.
Macquisten says research trips to the U.S. revealed the popularity of wine on tap. “Bartenders and servers absolutely loved its efficiencies. Consumers understood it right away and loved it.”
At this stage, forecasting how much to bottle and how much to keg is a challenge for B.C. wineries, says Thorp. But make no mistake, it’s too attractive a concept to dismiss, for wineries, restaurants and bars.
When I was visiting the Vancouver Urban Winery facilities, Ian Ross, president of Grateful Wines, a rep for Rollingdale, Crowsnest, and Beaumont wineries in the Okanagan, walked in. He’d been fielding queries from some of his pub and restaurant clients about keg wines and had arrived for an initial meeting with Macquisten and Thorp.
“It was pretty new to me, but I’m going to be promoting it positively to the wineries,” he said a few days after his meeting. “Why take yourself out of a market, even if you might have to make a special wine? It sounds good.”
mstainsby@vancouversun.com
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