Natural Wines at the LCBO! A Christmas Miracle!

Natural Wines at the LCBO?! Maybe Santa IS Real? We were excited to see so many amazing natural and biodynamic wines available this week at the King & Spadina (store 511) and Summerhill (store 10) LCBO locations. We were tipped off by a story on The Living Vine’s Instgram, a local importer of Organic, Biodynamic and Natural wines. We scooped up lots of gems but it left us wondering if this was just a Christmas miracle, or could it become a more regular occurence, so we provided feedback to Hello LCBO and fingers crossed they will listen!

Wine In The Market Is Actually Just Another Wine Rack. Ugh. It seems pretty misleading for this foreign owned wine conglomerate to try to quietly sneak into an independent-and-proud-of-it Toronto neighbourhood: “It's actually been branded as Wine In The Market…and Wine Rack's actual company logo is barely noticeable in the window.” I would love to see more local Ontario wine being sold, but it needs to be a level playing field for the small local wineries. This ain’t that.

What’s A Year-End Without A Top-25 List? Punch published its 25 Essential Wines of 2018 which provides a great explanation of the changing and expanding world of wine drinkers and makers. “There’s ever more sentiment that wine’s great recent exploratory phase has gone too far, become too weird, and that we need to just stick to the classics. That reactionary view hardly fits today’s wine world.” Indeed.

Praise Be, the Ontario Government Wants to Modernize Wine Sales. The Ontario government launched a consultation on alcohol choice and convenience. They are looking for input on how to improve the rules for how wine (and beer, spirits and cider) is sold, and if they should allow for new types of stores (yes, a thousand times yes). If you want a small neighbourhood natural wine store like I do, please make sure to fill out this survey if you are over 19, by February 1, 2019.