Canadian wine speaks with a Chilean accent

Most of us in the US don't think much about Canadian wine, beyond the occasional ice wine. But it's growing fast in popularity up north and no wonder: much of it is as Canadian as the Dallas Stars.

Wineries are allowed to label their wine as "Product of Canada" even if the bottle includes as little as 5 percent Canadian grapes. This is why New York-based Constellation Brands spent $1.09 billion in 2006 to buy Vincor, Canada's largest winery.

Since the purchase, Constellation has been shipping cheaply grown and harvested Chilean grapes by the boatload up to the Great White North to go into bottles that proudly fly the maple leaf flag.

This is not the only international skullduggery going on in the world of wine. Because of Australia's lengthy drought, some big Aussie wineries (Yellow Tail) have shipped cheap South African juice to Oz to go into bottles labeled as Australian wine. But the Aussie laws are tighter, and your bottle of Yellow Tail must contain at least 85 percent Australian wine. Not so for their hockey-playing partners in the Commonwealth.

Does this ever happen in the US? Not likely. It's legal -- and in fact, US laws are looser than Australia's, as only 75 percent of the juice in the bottle must be from this country.

But it makes little economic sense to put wine from another country under a US label because, thanks to our army of relatively cheap illegal labor from Mexico, California's Central Valley can produce bulk wine at competitive prices with Chile or South Africa. Sure, Chilean bulk wine is a little cheaper -- you won't find leftover Lodi grapes in Yellow Tail anytime soon. But when you add in the cost of shipping, and factor in more uneven quality in Chile at the bottom end of the grape market, it doesn't quite pencil out to put non-US wine in the bottle.

In Canada, on the other hand, well, let's just say there's quite a bit of chile in the maple syrup. So to speak.