We shouldn’t be making things this hard for Canadian winemakers
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Summary
Donald Zeraldo is a pioneer in the wine industry in Canada. He was one of the founders of Inniskillen Wine, a wine company that helped put Canada on the map as a wine destination. Now, he s running his own wine company, Zalderdo Estate Winery, in Niagara-on-the-Lake Ontario.
Transcript
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While it used to be considered much more of a European beverage or part of European culture,
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wine is definitely part of North American culture now.
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It shows up in our movies, on our dinner tables, in our TV shows, in general discussion.
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It's also a major industry, especially in Ontario and in British Columbia,
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They're thriving, but they could be doing even better.
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And today I wanted to look more at the business of wine
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and what we could do to make Canada a powerhouse in wine
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the way New Zealand has been able to do, or Australia.
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It wasn't that long ago that you just simply didn't grow grapes for making drinkable wine
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It was something that people would do as a hobby, but it wasn't something we were known for.
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One man, and the man we're going to speak to today, helped change that.
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Donald Zeraldo went from being a hobbyist to putting Canada on the map,
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He's one of the founders of Inniskillen, and even though he sold that company years ago,
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remained somewhat involved, and now has his own wine label, Zeraldo Estate Winery,
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he is someone deeply involved in the making of wine, the promotion of wine, the sale of wine
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in Canada, and seemed like a good guest to discuss how we take Canadian wine to the next level
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and how we got from, well, where we were to where we are now.
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Donald Zeraldo joins me from his home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
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I wonder if you could take us back to the beginning.
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I know you're at a new beginning now with your Zeraldo Estate Winery,
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but take us back to the beginning of when you really helped boost the Ontario wine business
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and built a company that is known around the world now out of nothing.
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How did an Italian guy and a German guy start a winery with an Irish-sounding name
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After I finished University of Guelph, I went back to the family farm in St. Catharines,
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and Carl Kaiser had dropped in to buy some plants that didn't taste Canadian.
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They just can't handle Fragolino, as it's called back home,
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and they're always thinking it's a real treat for me to have a Fragolino.
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And I'm like, please, guys, this has been my nemesis all my life.
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Just give me some picolethe or some Pinot Grigio or something.
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He wanted to plant some vines and grow some grapes to make wine.
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Yeah, just for himself, he'd married a Canadian, Sylvia,
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and he was working at a machine shop somewhere in St. Catharines,
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Fortunately, he took biochemistry, so he learned the scientific aspects of it.
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But he learned the art of winemaking at the monastery where he grew up in
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He came, I gave him some Deshaunac grape vines.
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He went and he bought some, I think, from Mr. Moyer, the farmer, up in the bench.
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And I guess he's somewhat jokingly said, well, why don't I make it and you sell it?
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So I literally went to Toronto and very innocently just walked in,
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asked the vice president, Mr. Harris, and he kind of chuckled.
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So you walk into one of the biggest liquor operations,
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sales operations in the world, and say, hey, can you sell my wine?
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So he said they didn't really have any application forms,
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So I kind of sheepishly left, came back, told Carl to forget it.
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And then General George Kitching, who was the chairman of the LCBO,
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retired general, he wrote a letter, and he asked if he could see me.
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I think I packed a suitcase back in those days.
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And he said, listen, I drank a lot of great wine during the war.
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I don't know where they got it from in Germany and France,
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but I can just imagine they probably helped themselves some of the best.
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And he said, I really, like, would appreciate if you could do something,
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because I understand you want to do European-style wines, blah, blah, blah.
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So it was honestly that innocent, and he became our mentor.
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And it really was a question of whatever I need.
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Nobody called him Mr. Kitching, or nobody called him George, for sure.
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And he really was instrumental over the next two years.
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Donald, I got some great news for you, but I got some bad news.
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The good news is you just got the first license since Prohibition to make wine
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And he and Bob Welsh, who was the deputy premier and the rep around the area here.
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And because I was growing grapevines, I'd always had an interest.
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My dad sent grapes, peaches, cherries, had everything.
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And so I came up here in Niagara Lake, and we basically agreed that we'd make a couple
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barrels of wine in my dad's basement on Ontario Street, where we got the manufacturing permit
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And then in the packing shed in Niagara on the lake, fruit packing shed, we put in a few
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barrels that we got from the cabort through Kitching and started in Eskillon in 1975.
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And I was going to fast forward, because there was trials and tribulations of starting any
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It was a startup, and we did it on the back of the farm.
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And basically, that's really how innocently it started, two guys in a garage, which they
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I mean, I don't think people realize how stifled anything to do with alcohol was for
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Yeah, we left prohibition back in the 30s, but the mentality didn't necessarily change.
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I remember going with my dad as a kid to the LCBO, and he would have to fill out a form
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and hand it to them, and he would have to tell them his address and his route home, and you
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You couldn't go anywhere else with a bottle of booze.
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It was very, very provincial in how we looked at these things.
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They should have a video to show it, because they were behind a counter.
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They went in the back somewhere, put it in a brown paper bag, and handed it to you.
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And that's, you know, at those times, very few women would be in shopping.
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Sundays you couldn't drink, because it was, you know, Hyde Park, you couldn't drink, period.
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You really got to watch it to get a sense of how crazy it all seemed at the time.
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But, you know, as I listened to it, it's pretty simple.
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You know, we just started, and we went from there.
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We just decided we were going to use European grapes.
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And then here's another sort of one of these issues that seems like crazy now.
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But I had grafted 30,000 grafted grapevines, because all the viniferas technically have
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to be grafted onto rootstocks that are resistant to phylloxera, which the native grapes are resistant
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So when I grafted these 30,000 vines, the official word was that it was too cold to grow vinifera
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There was some experimenting going on at Bright's Winery here in Niagara, and also Chateau Gay,
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But nobody was commercializing it, so I couldn't sell these 30,000 vines, so I bought the Jefferies
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Farm, which is now the Seeger Vineyard, and planted all 30,000, Riesling, Chardonnay, and Gamay.
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And at that time, in 1977, we had a disastrous harvest, which you'll see in the video if you
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So there, yeah, there was trials and tribulations, you know, some good, some bad, a lot of fun.
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We were naive and young enough to not worry about it, worked 24-7.
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Carl had come here after his work at the university.
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And like I said, the big break came in 1971 when we took the ice wine.
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Well, we didn't make it in 83, sorry, because the birds ate it all.
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84 after we learned to cover them with netting.
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So 84, but the 91 was the year we won the Grand Prix de Neur in France, which just exploded
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And I want to get to that in a minute, but I want you to explain for people that aren't
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real winos, when you talk about grafting the grapes, you had to take, you wanted to grow
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European-style grape varieties in Canada, but you couldn't plant those directly.
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So you had to graft a vine from Europe onto a native vine from here in North America?
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Vitis riparia, which you'll see growing on fence hedges, up in trees, you know, if you're
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anywhere around southern Ontario or eastern seaboard of the United States, you see these
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Very resistant to the cold, very resistant to phylloxera, which is a root louse.
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The European varieties, which is Vitis vinifera, to distinguish it from Vitis riparia, or Vitis
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Those Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Grigio, all those European varieties
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have to be grafted onto resistant root stocks here in all over the world.
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For that matter, with the exception of possibly parts of Chile and parts of New Zealand.
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But it's a safety precaution to stay away from this louse, because eventually it'll invade.
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So when Jack Cartier, whoever took the wild vines from eastern seaboard, along with tobacco
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from Virginia, pineapple from South America, tomatoes, took them back to Europe, they also
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brought this root louse along, and it just about wiped out the industry in the middle 1800s.
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So wiping out the wine industry in the middle 1800s was pretty fundamental, because that was
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You know, wine is part of the food culture in Europe, and, you know, the Roman soldiers used
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it as their Gatorade, because they gave them energy, and the water was too polluted.
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So that whole basis is now the basis of our premium wines, all grafted on these grape vines.
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And the irony is that the origin of these wild vines came from North America, and all of the
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grape vines in Europe were grafted as well on North American root stocks.
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When you started out, I'm going to use some of the brand names of your competitors down
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the street, Baby Duck, I think that was, Peller had Baby Duck.
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Yeah, that was Andrew Peller and his son John, who left being a doctor in Hamilton to, I guess
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he created Baby Duck, it became a real phenomenon, as you know.
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Yeah, so, you know, when I've talked to the Pellers, you know, they said, we had to make
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wine that people would drink, and they didn't know wine very well in Canada back then.
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I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood in Hamilton, so most of my neighbors made their
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own wine, and you get introduced to it that way.
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But they're trying to sell it, and they had to find something sweet, something palatable.
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Did you have to do much of that in the early days of saying, okay, what will Betty Sue buy
00:14:52.920
No, I didn't do any market research, because, you know, it's like, if I look back now, I
00:14:58.900
can look at Steve Jobs, nobody did market research and said, we need a iPhone with a screen on
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And, you know, we just took what the Europeans were doing, what Carl knew how to do, because
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And the other thing that caught my attention was when I did travel to Europe, even going back
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to Friuli, where my family's from, they grow peaches, cherries, lemons, but mostly grapes
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And if you go up to Germany and Switzerland, they don't grow peaches and cherries there.
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So I thought, it seems odd that they can do that, and we cannot.
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So being in the nursery business, I, you know, tried it, and I found it very intriguing to
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There's a community near my family's hometown in Italy called Rauscedo.
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And as you know, in Europe, they do a lot of cluster industries.
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And they do, you know, Spielenbergo does mosaics.
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And in Rauscedo, they do 100 million grafted vines, ship them all over the world.
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We couldn't bring them in as rooted vines because the virus is so.
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So I would bring the rootstocks that they grew, and they were actually cultivated from
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And then I would graft them because we then go along and pick the clones.
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So over time, where the industry is really evolving is that we are picking clones, which
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Take those buds and graft them so that we adapt to our climatic conditions more and more.
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Just as they did when the Romans planted all of Europe.
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And then slowly, you know, Burgundy became famous for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Riesling
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So in here, it evolved from the Brusca's, the Concord Niagara's, through the hybrid period,
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But then we quickly learned that if you had the right management.
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And the people that were very helpful in the management were the German and Italian immigrants,
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like the Seegers, the Schulas, people in Collio, De Luca, they thought, you know, we can grow
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Why shouldn't we be able to grow it here where there's peach orchards right beside us?
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And they were very instrumental in pushing the needle forward because they had no resistance
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How much effort did it take to convince Canadian consumers to try this?
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Well, I spent most of my time outside of Canada for two reasons.
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One is, you know, it's very hard to convince Canadians.
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If you're making a Canadian film or if you're a Canadian actor or a singer, you pretty much
00:17:45.680
got to go to the United States to become famous.
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So I thought, you know, maybe we need to go somewhere to become famous so that Canadians
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And we got lucky in 91 when we won the Grand Prix de Neur and then shortly after the Grand
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Premier in Italy, the wine world told the world that we made the best dessert wine in
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And particularly the Japanese who were visiting Niagara Falls a lot, they discovered it.
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Because they thought, well, these Canadians who we, I mean, who the hell ever heard of
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They loved the whole idea of gifting, which they do a lot in the Asian community.
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So we locked into that and we'd get five, six bus tours from JTV Tours.
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You could almost set your watch to their schedule.
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They'd come in, they'd get armfuls of ice wine, go back.
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We even set up a shop transportation, you know, courier service.
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And then I hopped on a plane, went to Japan and we did duty free, did the airlines and
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And I was doing that 24, seven, 200 days a year, flying around selling ice wine because
00:19:09.580
people got it psychologically, Canada and ice wine.
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And well, and if you've tried it and I have both at the Uniskillen shop and at home on,
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But the best way I, people say to me, how do you sell it?
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I just ask people to taste it and then I don't have to say it because usually the reaction
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is wow, especially at the beginning when they hadn't tried it.
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So many years were great, you know, very instrumental.
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They started putting it into their global competitions and it just started to spread like wildfire.
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The amazing thing that I remember, I did a special tour of Uniskillen several times.
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years ago and they described how you'd worked with Rydell glassware to come up with specific
00:20:01.880
glasses and they had us try the ice wine several different ways and then tried it in the glass
00:20:06.460
designed for ice wine to hit at the right spot on your tongue.
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Yeah, this is a way to sell me a really expensive glass.
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And then you try it and you go, oh my God, that tastes so much better.
00:20:21.080
Yeah, it was a work in progress because George Rydell's Austrian, as Carl is.
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So Carl, who was the genius behind ice wine, I mean, the guy just like, he just knew how
00:20:33.600
I guess he was gifted having learned it, you know, in his homeland.
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And what we did with Rydell initially was we sat 16 experts down, had four different ice
00:20:46.640
wines in front of us, Carl and George Rydell were conducting the tasting at the Hyatt in
00:20:56.040
Six hours later, if you know wine people, like all of us, love to argue about which one's
00:21:00.780
the best, which is glass is best, which best corkscrew, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:07.340
So George said, look, fine, I get the three finalists.
00:21:10.200
There's the port glass, a Sauternes, and a Sauternes port, and a Sauvignon Blanc glass.
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And the best thing I can say about it is when Carl was presented with the glass and, you
00:21:29.460
know, he spent 20 minutes, half an hour swishing it and tasting, he said to George Rydell, this
00:21:42.260
And let me give your listeners an opportunity to get to deep dive into not only the ice wine,
00:21:48.820
but into the Rydell hand-blown crystal we made.
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If you go to my website, xeraldo.ca, and you go under Menu, scroll down to Book, and then
00:22:07.660
But if you put in the discount box, which is a gift from me to you and your listeners,
00:22:13.260
put Vidal, which is the hybrid, the famous hybrid that we make ice wine from, put that
00:22:17.900
in the discount box, and you'll get a copy of my book, Ice Wine, which Carl and I wrote
00:22:23.020
and you will have everything imaginable you'd ever want to know about ice wine and its
00:22:29.140
creation and a lot of its evolution, and also the terroir in our region, you know, what
00:22:35.120
makes the Niagara region below the escarpment and Lake Ontario so unique in its ability to
00:22:44.520
Well, it is amazing, and I've enjoyed, you know, examining different wine regions across
00:22:58.680
You said to get Canadians to appreciate something, you had to go to the States.
00:23:03.960
Speaking with a friend a little while ago, he said, you know what?
00:23:10.060
This could be a huge industry, much bigger than it is, but it doesn't get the support.
00:23:17.020
Between the fact that we've got trade barriers and how governments view it, what's your take
00:23:26.800
on that idea that wine could be a major industry, but it's not reached its potential?
00:23:33.140
No, and I'll tell you, I can sit and bitch and complain, which, you know, often happens
00:23:38.340
too much, but I think the reason that Carl and I were successful, we just put our heads
00:23:42.480
down and just made quality wine, and he made great wine, and I was tasked with the idea
00:23:48.940
of leaving the vineyard and going and selling it to the world, and it worked because we just
00:23:57.580
It was blessed by the French and by the Italians, and what was great, I'll give you a couple
00:24:01.900
examples, one example, Marques of Piero Antinori or Sandro Boscaini from Mazzi, both in two
00:24:09.340
different instances at a gala dinner, asked me to speak on behalf of dessert wine, ice wine,
00:24:15.860
because they were serving their wine, Ricciotto in the case of Mazzi from Verona, and Piero Antinori
00:24:22.200
from Tuscany with, you know, his great Sesecayas, and he was serving Vinsanto, and they both said,
00:24:28.060
look, you know, these are nice wines, you know, but they're not our main, they're just
00:24:31.120
something we do because we all make a dessert wine.
00:24:36.900
Taste ice wine from Canada, and that, you know, that's, you can't buy that kind of publicity,
00:24:42.580
so that was really fundamentally what we did, like actors going on stage, was to get the
00:24:48.720
Europeans to sanction us, and you know, many of the wineries, as I said the other day,
00:24:53.920
I read that Decanter did a great spread on the Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays from, specifically
00:24:59.280
from, I think it was just Ontario, not BC, and they got great accolades, so I think it's
00:25:05.560
I'm jealous of New Zealand, for example, who started out, you know, the same time as we
00:25:10.700
did in the 70s, and we were both doing 40,000 tons.
00:25:15.260
They now do 500,000 tons plus, we still, we do 80,000, so I think we have great room for
00:25:21.400
potential, we make great wines, there's a lot of young people now, I'm always speaking
00:25:26.440
highly of people like Kevin at 20, 27, you know, Marco Piccoli now has got on his own
00:25:35.240
at the Crush, where he's doing Crush for different wineries, so you can actually go there and do
00:25:40.560
a virtual reality winery, so we've come a long way, there's no question, now we've got to
00:25:44.900
get out and market this, tell the world, like everybody else does, because you know, the
00:25:49.120
French and the Italians, and they're spending all of their time traveling around, talking
00:25:54.660
about their wines, and we get a lot of respect, I just came back from a tasting, as I said
00:25:59.240
to you, in Paris, after I left, I was in Italy, doing my Prosecco vineyard, back to my roots,
00:26:07.380
and Jean-Luc wrote to me, and I should read the email, but it's pretty exciting, so I'm sitting
00:26:12.460
in Italy making some wine, and Jean-Luc writes this, and he was asked, or one of his staff
00:26:18.000
was asked to attend a tasting at Chateau de Kim, so Brian, Chateau de Kim is undoubtedly
00:26:25.880
the best-deserved wine in the world, bar none, so basically what he said was, one of his folks
00:26:31.720
went to a tasting at Chateau de Kim in France, the Great Sauternes, and he said the wine showed
00:26:37.900
very well, now that would be like going to the Academy Awards and showing very well, after
00:26:44.460
the fact, when you got Chateau de Kim and other deserved wines, so that's the kind of accolades
00:26:50.960
All right, I need to take a quick break, when we come back, I want to talk to you more about
00:26:55.040
the fact that we've got separate wine industries and separate provinces, and we don't always
00:27:02.660
drink our own stuff, we don't drink our own hooch like we should, Donald.
00:27:09.940
I remember years ago, when I was still living in Montreal, going on the SAQ website, that
00:27:15.500
is their government liquor store website, and even in the early 2000s, it was very advanced
00:27:21.900
in telling you exactly which product you wanted and which store it was at, and so, Donald, I
00:27:29.580
remember going to one particular SAQ location up in Cote St. Luke, because I was big into
00:27:37.720
a, I think I was drinking a lot of the Henry of Pelham back-au-Noir back then, and they
00:27:42.800
said they had some of that in stock, and not easy to get outside of Ontario.
00:27:47.420
So I went up, and I'm looking all over the store, and couldn't find it, and finally I
00:27:54.420
stopped and I asked somebody where it was, and he took me to this one small little section,
00:27:59.040
and whereas everything else was labeled under its country of origin, this wine was labeled
00:28:04.460
under a sign that said, Diverpay, other countries, and that's, you know, some people will scoff
00:28:13.220
and say, oh, well, that's Quebec, but that's really how we treat wine in this country.
00:28:19.120
You go to Western Canada, it's hard to find Ontario wine.
00:28:24.400
We can't get Okanagan wine easily in Ontario or east of Ontario.
00:28:30.520
We don't tend to support our own industry, I would say, with these trade barriers.
00:28:37.680
I know you said you just, you know, stuck your head down and did it, but if we're going to
00:28:41.440
go from 80,000 to 500,000 like the Kiwis, don't we have to start supporting our own industry,
00:28:53.420
Listen, we could spend hours talking this, because I spent half my lifetime trying to
00:29:00.380
Bottom line is, we've got to get rid of the interprovincial barriers.
00:29:03.980
I was sitting with Premier Bennett and Premier Peterson at the 86 Olympics, sorry, not the
00:29:09.960
Olympics, Expo 86, and I had to smuggle my Chardonnay into the Ontario Pavilion because
00:29:19.820
They shouldn't be there, and we should get rid of them.
00:29:22.420
But the industry itself has its own problem because we need to work more unified as an
00:29:29.940
When California or France or Bordeaux or Burgundy or County come here, they come as an organization.
00:29:38.720
So, yeah, the industry is sort of, I think, at a very big turning point, and we just need
00:29:44.200
But, you know, it's no different in the fashion industry in Canada, no different in the film
00:29:52.340
Because right now, if you look at the biggest singers in the world, if I'm not mistaken,
00:29:59.180
And there's a whole list of them I could go through.
00:30:11.320
So, I think, you know, they've broken the mold.
00:30:13.040
We just need to follow along and just keep making great wines.
00:30:15.940
And we've got to get off our ass and get out there and sell it to the world.
00:30:18.860
Because it's also hard to find Canadian wine anywhere.
00:30:21.740
Whereas, as I said, I'm envious of New Zealand, because you can go anywhere in the world and
00:30:26.800
get New Zealand, and they're not giving it away.
00:30:37.140
We've now been recognized as the world producer for ice wine, even though we give credit to
00:30:48.380
So, if that's the umbrella, and they're expecting us to charge so much money for a
00:30:53.080
great wine, let's do the same, bring in the premium Chardonnays, premium Pinot Noirs, which
00:30:58.040
were just given credit in Decanter, and let's get out there and sell it.
00:31:02.480
I'm just, I guess, a little impatient, because I didn't think it would take this long to get
00:31:08.240
But it's coming, and we've just got to work hard.
00:31:10.480
And we appreciate journalists who write about our wines, and we'd like you to write more
00:31:17.240
It also helps me to explain a little bit about the history, but more importantly, about
00:31:21.520
the future, because I think with the young people, we've got two schools now, Niagara
00:31:26.560
College, and we've got Covey, Pool Climate Enology and Viticulture Institute.
00:31:33.480
And a lot of the graduates are young ladies, young men who have stayed here and gone back
00:31:38.360
to the farm or working at the wineries, and there's many of them, very successful.
00:31:42.380
In terms of supporting our own industry, one thing that somebody said to me a little while
00:31:50.420
ago, and I'm not sure if I agree with it, but I can see it being an impediment if there
00:31:57.240
And they said, well, Canadian wine's pretty good, but it's overpriced for what you get.
00:32:11.740
Well, I'll tell you, if you want to drive a Ferrari, you can't buy a Chevy.
00:32:15.900
So, you know, I thought, what am I going to tell you?
00:32:22.280
It's very difficult to grow grapes in this tiny area.
00:32:25.200
Where I was just in Italy, I drove across the northern from all the way from Prosecco
00:32:30.960
country, Friuli, all the way across to Piemonte.
00:32:34.360
There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres of vineyard.
00:32:38.340
You plant them anywhere, hillsides, slopes, flatland.
00:32:43.560
So the argument, you could keep arguing that all the time, but, you know, you're going to
00:32:47.920
pay big prices for great French and, you know, upwards of $10,000, $20,000 a bottle for the
00:32:55.620
great first growths for the Burgundies, Domaine La Romanie Conti, Chateau Margaux, Chateau
00:33:02.120
But you can also buy a $10 bottle of French wine if you want to drink that stuff.
00:33:09.440
We as an industry need to get into premiumization.
00:33:17.320
And, you know, that was put there for a purpose.
00:33:20.440
When we weren't growing enough viniferin hybrids, we needed to supplement with some other grapes.
00:33:28.260
I think we should separate it, make it 100% imported.
00:33:30.840
We still get all the benefits of labor and so on, the whatever it is that, you know,
00:33:36.600
contributes to the profitability of that sector.
00:33:40.680
We've had a 7% market share for the last 10 years.
00:33:46.820
Yeah, the 23% to 30% that's talked about includes blended wines.
00:33:52.920
So in Ontario, I'm just now, I have this statistic.
00:33:55.380
And B.C., they're much, much better because, you know, the West Coast is always much more supportive of their native goods, you know,
00:34:06.280
I was looking at the numbers the other day at Oregon and California.
00:34:10.160
You know, they're up, I've got the number somewhere, but I was shocked at the number of acres.
00:34:18.060
You told me a story before we started recording about being on a flight recently.
00:34:24.320
And even though you're sitting in the good seats, you're up front, you had to argue to get Canadian wine served to you.
00:34:33.360
Claude Villaday was great in the day when he was president.
00:34:36.540
And he insisted on the Chardonnay being on first class in Air Canada.
00:34:43.000
And I even remember putting a video that they put a video in about people coming in, like when I saw the one today coming back,
00:34:48.280
or yesterday, coming back from Venice, that it was promoting Toronto as a city, great city that it is,
00:35:01.120
And, you know, see, I cause trouble all the time.
00:35:03.500
Because if you fly on Qantas, you're not going to be drinking Canadian wine.
00:35:08.340
Or if you fly on Air France, you're not going to be drinking German wine.
00:35:16.980
But I did get a Henry of Pelham Riesling and a Trius Cabernet, I think it was a Cabernet Franc.
00:35:27.360
And I tasted the others, you know, the imports.
00:35:32.900
If you did it blind, I'll bet you nobody on that airplane could tell me the difference between which country they came from.
00:35:37.780
What needs to be done next, either by the industry or by government to help?
00:35:44.960
I hear a lot in Ontario, because I spend a lot of time at Queen's Park covering provincial politics, that they've got to get rid of this 6.1% excise tax.
00:35:55.160
Yeah, that's one thing the industry is working on right now, Brian.
00:35:59.340
And it's part of an overall ask of the Ontario government to give the industry a break.
00:36:12.320
And it's basically suggesting that the wine industry in the Niagara Peninsula, specifically, because it was done for this region.
00:36:21.600
And it basically says that we could, we as the foundation of tourism, which we've been doing for 20 years, we're kind of blessed and cursed being near Niagara Falls.
00:36:33.960
And that could generate, I think it was $8 billion was the number that it could generate to enhance the economic development.
00:36:42.280
Now, be clear, when I say economic development, my intent is to shove the economic development above the escarpment.
00:36:48.360
Because one of my pet focuses right now is, and I've been spending time with the industry trying to figure out how we incorporate this request of the government to support us, federal and provincial.
00:37:01.500
And with this new initiative to drive hospitality and tourism to a greater level.
00:37:07.700
And thirdly, get the traffic off the Niagara Peninsula, build the Mid-Peninsula Corridor.
00:37:16.320
And I know people don't like the idea because it's a highway.
00:37:19.060
But if we don't stop developing in on the very restricted fruit lands below the escarpment, which is the only place with the exception of Prince Edward County and down in Lake Erie, Newark Shore, that we can grow grapes.
00:37:33.580
In 20 years, you've seen what's happened in the last 20 years if you drive down the QE.
00:37:37.160
We aren't going to have an industry because you can't plant grapes above the escarpment.
00:37:41.180
Not commercially viable yet, unless we get four or five degrees of global warming, which, you know, is certainly impacting the industry.
00:37:48.520
But so there's a number of things that got to be done.
00:37:50.600
And the other thing is the industry really needs to get together as a unified voice for the simple reason that government will only listen to an industry if it's unified and it's asked.
00:38:00.820
Can't be different sectors asking for different things because it's really easy for the government just to say, well, go home, get your act together and then come back.
00:38:08.100
But more importantly, focus on viticulture, growing better quality grapes and continuing to improve the wine, which you'll see is done in every country.
00:38:19.400
I just came back from Italy and they're doing as much research as they were 100 years ago to improve for a number of reasons.
00:38:25.860
One, to adapt to climatic conditions that are changing dramatically in Europe.
00:38:31.040
I mean, Italy's had a devastating season between hail the size of baseballs, floods in Bologna in the middle, and then heat in the south where Sicily probably abandoned 30, 40 percent of its crop to mildew and rain.
00:38:49.700
So, you know, we have coal, but we learned to manage with it.
00:38:52.320
We have a lot of technology coming out of the research station and out of the schools.
00:38:56.360
But my suggestion to the industry, stop spending all the time lobbying government, which we haven't been very successful at, and let's get out there and sell a wine.
00:39:07.620
Let's hire a dozen sommeliers and send them in the marketplace.
00:39:19.980
It's just making premium wines and leaving the, quote, I'll exaggerate, leave the baby ducks behind us.
00:39:25.180
Let's stop talking about them and let's move on to the great Cabernet Francs we make.
00:39:32.140
Okanagan, they do a great job with Reds because it's a semi-arid desert out there.
00:39:36.320
So, the Ford government in Ontario is looking at changing how beer and wine is sold, and you know that.
00:39:44.860
There have been primarily two wine companies that have benefited from having their own wine shops, but they're looking at expanding sales to corner stores in different places.
00:40:01.180
Would that help the industry or not matter based on what you're talking about?
00:40:05.780
Because, you know, my experience with Quebec is that you'll get, most cities, most neighborhoods will have one store that carries the good stuff, and the rest, you're going in for a quick bottle just to get something because you're out.
00:40:19.820
Well, they're called des panneurs, and if you check, that's all bottled bulk wine that comes in and bottled.
00:40:27.740
It was owned by the SAQ, now it's independent, the bottling facility.
00:40:35.100
If it's done right, I mean, distribution of wine could be done better.
00:40:41.620
So, I think there are improvements, just like the industry can.
00:40:45.220
I think there's a lot of room for improvement, especially accessibility for the small wineries, because, you know, as long as they're successful selling fruit at the door, you know, as we call a cellar door, but when we started, there were six wineries, all of which have now basically been morphed into the, quote, as you call them, big ones.
00:41:04.620
It was a survival technique when the government threw us under the bus with the free trade agreement back in the 80s, late 80s.
00:41:12.100
So, that distribution is welcome, but at the same time, we've got to do it properly, not haphazardly.
00:41:19.120
Mr. Ford has a bad habit like he did with the green belt.
00:41:24.660
Now he's had to apologize because that was a huge movement against, you know, damaging the green belt.
00:41:30.040
So, we don't want the same thing to happen with distribution.
00:41:36.020
I had a suggestion that I've even given to the government and the LCBO.
00:41:39.740
Why don't we take the vintagest stores, which are the specialty stores, take them away from a government agency, which has to be noncommittal, generic, if you know what I mean.
00:41:49.440
Get that to whoever wants to, you know, license them or buy them, like they did with cannabis, and then let some sommeliers run them.
00:41:57.080
They're going to provide outstanding service because right now, we used to have wine consultants at the LCBO.
00:42:05.300
And I think also, no, and the liquor board technically is not allowed to tell you, you know, Henry Appelum, Baconoire is better than Cape Springs, Cap Franc or whatever, because that's not, you know, they should do it, in my opinion.
00:42:20.620
So, yeah, I think distribution needs to be looked at.
00:42:28.300
And putting it in the grocery stores, you know, there's all kinds of controversy about what's going on in the grocery business right now.
00:42:39.900
I think the boutiques that the wineries have, you know, they were purchased because basically those were each individual licenses at one time owned by a winery.
00:42:49.420
So, since Prohibition, various wineries have bought them.
00:42:54.880
So, when we bought London, we absorbed those 12 stores when I say Vincor.
00:42:58.740
So, I've had both feet in both sides, you know, the independent in a skill in which we built.
00:43:03.580
And then, by necessity, had to survive after the free trade agreement and got better distribution because we were able to sell in a skill in 140 stores.
00:43:12.900
But they could do a case study at a university of how long it took us to break that rule that wherever the wine was manufactured, only those retail stores owned by that manufacturing permit could sell it.
00:43:27.000
We need to get, like, come on, let's get over this.
00:43:29.860
You know, wine to me as an Italian is a food stable where I just came from in Italy.
00:43:39.420
And I just read this ridiculous report, you know, and once I looked up who wrote it, the Alcohol, Drug, and Addiction Foundation.
00:43:49.100
Was I surprised that they said don't drink too much wine or too much alcohol?
00:43:53.300
Are these the guys that said no more than two drinks a week?
00:43:59.520
Well, you know, if you're ever getting paid to sell that propaganda, I guess you're going to stick with that storyline.
00:44:07.480
If you don't want to drink, that's entirely up to you.
00:44:10.040
But don't tell me where I, you know, consider this a culture.
00:44:14.980
I'm right now even playing with the idea of doing an interview, like a TV series for wine, because there's so much food, chefs, chef competitions, food shows, food network.
00:44:25.280
There really isn't one that focuses on wine, but not just wine like us here talking heads.
00:44:32.320
I'm talking about visiting the vineyards all over the world, expressing the winemakers, terroir, you know, all of the different regions, the vintages.
00:44:42.540
I just spent two weeks in Italy, and I ran out of time.
00:44:45.780
I just should have stayed another two weeks just to get a sense of what's going on with this year's harvest.
00:44:50.100
Donald, it sounds like you've had a pretty good career in the wine business that started out by mistakes.
00:44:56.780
So, you know, happy mistakes turned into a great career for you.
00:45:05.460
Brian, it was a great pleasure, and thank you for the opportunity.
00:45:12.640
This episode was produced by Andre Proulx with theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:45:19.340
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00:45:24.400
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00:45:31.280
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