• Most Popular Articles in Food & Wine

  1. Duck breast with orange ginger soy sauce
  2. Rosemary roasted chicken
  3. Roast Rack of pomegranate molasses glazed Veal
  4. Pan-seared Duck Breast with Port Currant Sauce
  5. Niagara-on-the Lake Wine Tasting Getaway
  6. Roasted Butternut Squash Soup with Apple Cider and Spiced Crème Fraiche

  See More...

Fame on the Vine

What do an Oscar-winning director, a Formula One driving champ, a French acting icon, an Australian golfing pro, a Canadian Blues Brother, and an aging English pop star have in common? Wine. Red, white, dry, sweet, or sparkling wine—it would appear there is an international movement afoot by celebrities to put their money in the noble grape, giving credence to the old joke: How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Begin with a large one. Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Andretti, Gérard Dépardieu, Greg Norman, Dan Aykroyd, Sir Cliff Richard and a select few other A-list celebrities have taken to buying up vineyards and branding their own wine.

Fame on the Vine Sonja Smits at Closson Chase Vineyards, Hillier, Ontario (www.clossonchase.com)

Without a doubt, the dean of celebrity winemaking is Coppola, director of the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, who bought into the business when he purchased an historic Napa Valley winery, the French chateauinspired Inglenook estate, in 1975, renaming it Niebaum-Coppola. He was one of the growers in Napa Valley’s rise to international acclaim, and among his portfolio is one of California’s cult wines, Rubicon. In 2006, Coppola split his winemaking operations in two, with the Francis Coppola Presents winery in Sonoma County, and Inglenook, which now produces the newly branded Rubicon Estate wines. His daughter Sofia, the director of Lost in Translation and more recently Marie Antoinette, has got into the act with her own sparkling wine sold in cans (!) for a younger generation of budding oenophiles.

Napa Valley is also the home of the vineyard of America’s most famous racing car driver and patriarch of a racing family, Mario Andretti, who bought into the business in 1996. He now produces five Napa wines under his own name and also under the Montona label (named after his Italian hometown). French acting legend Gérard Dépardieu owns vineyards in the Anjou, Bordeaux and Languedoc wine-growing regions of France, and also in Morocco, Spain and Argentina, producing no less than seven wines in partnership with winemaker Bernard Magrez. Golfing pro Greg Norman, nicknamed the Great White Shark from Down Under, owns the Greg Norman Estates in Coonawarra, South Australia’s top red wine-growing region, and produces a signature brand of merlot. Sir Cliff Richard, England’s original answer to Elvis Presley, owns The Adega do Cantor (The Cellar of the Singer) winery in the Algarve region of Portugal, where he produces Vida Nova wines.



Other celebrity oenophiles include folk legend Bob Dylan, who owns estates in Italy and produces wines under the brands Planet Waves and Visions of J. (named after one of his most famous cuts, “Visions of Johanna,” from his classic Blonde on Blonde recording). South African golfer Ernie Els opened his own winery in 2004 and produces classic reds. New Zealand actor Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) makes a fine pinot noir at his Two Paddocks Vineyard in the Central Otago region on the South Island, and Australian songstress Olivia Newton John (Grease) produces Koala Blue Premium Wines. Improbably, Vince Neil, the tattooed lead singer from the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe, has his own signature brand produced at the Vince Vineyards. Dead celebrities with their own brands include Vancouver-born actor Raymond Burr, The Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, and even Elvis, whose ghostly Jailhouse Red Merlot has been described by one witty critic as being “bad enough to start a jailhouse riot.”

In Ontario, we have the aforementioned Dan Aykroyd, and championship golfer Mike Weir, who owns the Mike Weir Estate Winery and produces vidal icewines and chardonnays in Niagara. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, who recently announced his own line of Niagara wines, the labels of which will bear his famed No. 99, and is planning to open a winery in 2009. Bob Izumi, host of the “Real Fishing” TV and radio shows, is part of Coyote’s Run Estate Winery in St. David’s, Ontario, after developing an interest in wine because of his passion for cooking. New to the grape-growing game is the award-winning actress Sonja Smits (star of the CBC series “Street Legal,” Global’s “Traders” and the made-for-television movie based on the Margaret Laurence novel, The Diviners), who, along with her husband, former television producer Seaton McLean, and several other investors, owns the Closson Chase Winery in Prince Edward County.

Ontario’s Prince Edward County, an isolated bucolic stretch of land lying just south of the 401 highway, nestled on the shores of Lake Ontario west of Kingston, is the latest to be plowed under for the cultivation of grapes. When Smits and McLean purchased their 50 acres of farmland in 1998, there were three other wineries in the region. Today, there are over a dozen. Under the tutelage of viticulturalist Deborah Paskus, known as Canada’s chardonnay diva, and with French-imported vines, they now have 30 acres of grapes, 80 per cent chardonnay and 20 per cent pinot noir. The wine shop and production facilities are housed in a renovated 130-year-old barn that has been restored and refurbished to accommodate a tasting room. The winery opened in 2004 and at the end of 2006 it was announced that Paskus had joined Closson Chase full time as its resident winemaker. Lifestyle Ontario interviewed Sonja Smits on a beautiful sunny day at her home just outside of Hillier.



Q Why did you choose pinot noir, which I understand is a notoriously difficult grape to grow?

A It’s much tougher to establish the vines here. Grape vines are kinda perverse, in that they like stress and they like the rough soil that nothing else will grow in. It’s tricky, and it’s called the heartbreak grape but it can be such a beautifully elegant wine. At first we planted only a little bit of pinot, because we weren’t sure about it. I asked Deborah [Paskus] about this, and she said either you are going to get more encouraged or more discouraged. We got more and more encouraged and it seems to like it here. With the chardonnay, we do it in traditional oak barrels for 18 months, and we do some in un-oaked barrels for six months. Our chardonnay sells for $40 a bottle, and Deborah has made some for $65 a bottle, but our un-oaked we sell for $20. You don’t always want a big, complex wine but if you do, our Closson Chase is for you. That’s the kind of wine we are making. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of passion and a lot of money to have a vineyard and make your own wines. We are only interested in doing it if we are making fabulous wine.

Q You grew up on a farm in the Ottawa Valley and your father was a dairy farmer. Is this like returning to your roots?

A I missed the farm. I always like being in the country, but I’ve been a city girl, and I love being in the city as well. So it’s yes and no. When we first bought the place I had my doubts, because you are always worrying about the weather. Is it going to rain? Then there’s too much rain. You’re always watching the temperature to see if it drops. That’s the sort of stuff I grew up with. I was worrying if we don’t get rain, the vines are going to die; and if we get too much rain there would be mould on the grapes. Then I realized I had come full circle without planning to, without any forethought. I’m back were I started, which is interesting. Now I have children, and priorities change. I had a career in acting and I was very focused on that, and then I thought I wanted a bit more than that, something that takes me beyond myself, which certainly children do. Being involved with Prince Edward County and the changes that are happening here—pioneering in a way—and being part of a larger community that is trying to do something, I think, is a positive thing.

Q How much do you have under acreage?

A Thirty acres now. We started with 15, and we just bought the land across the road and planted another 15. Did you see the church across the road? We moved it. We have to use seasonal workers, and we needed a place to house them. We could have brought in some ugly trailers, but there was a church we passed by all the time. It looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchock movie beside a Loyalist cemetery. It turned out that the congregation had not used it for several years, and it was going to be torn down. So we moved it to Closson Chase. The community is happy we saved the church. We didn’t want to be just a bunch of people from Toronto who came here and imposed our stake on the property.



Q How long have you been operating in Prince Edward County?

A About eight years now. That’s how long it’s taken, and it’s really only since 2005 that we have been able to produce our own wine. We were wiped out by birds, by raccoons, by two terrible winters. What works in Niagara doesn’t work here. We had to reinvent and figure out what works here. We are on a migratory route. It’s beautiful with all the birds, but they ate our first crop. We have to net the whole field. We actually have to place nets over the entire 15-acre field, and you have to figure out how to do that.

Q I understand your first crop of grapes came from France.

A That’s right. Deborah ordered them for us from France, from Burgundy. The first shipment was lost at sea.

Q What? Tell me about that.

A It was in the news. We wanted to start slowly, so we planted two acres. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? We learnt from that, then we planted another eight and then another 10. We did it incrementally because it’s new area. We ordered our next batch of grapes, and they are shipped over by boat. The boat got caught in a storm and was in trouble, so they literally threw the vines overboard. We went “what? This can’t be,” but they did. It was one disaster after another for the first few years, so the fact that we are still here and we’re actually producing wine is amazing.

Q Tell me about where you live now.

A We bought an original 1860s Loyalist farmhouse. The front part of the house, with the floorboards and corner cupboard, that’s all original. In the 1920s the middle section was added, and 10 years ago the back part was added for a guest bedroom. And that’s how farmhouses evolved around here. You added more rooms as your fortunes improved. We have a gorgeous old barn. It’s beautiful, and I love it. We started the winery first. That was just an old barn with some broken-down cars being stored in it. There was a smaller building, which we use for processing the grapes, and the main barn, which we converted into the office and a space for tasting. We also converted what used to be the pig barn into what I call the “swinery,” where we store the barrels.



Q I would like to ask you how you process your grapes. I understand you use a centuries-old European tradition. What does this mean?

A It means a lot of hands-on work, which is why we sell a premium wine. We don’t have machines picking the grapes. The big producers have machines to do that work, which knocks the grapes around. Ours is all handpicked and hand hoed. It’s all handwork. In the winter we have to take the lead canes off the vines, and we tie them down to the wire, about six inches off the ground, and we work up the soil to cover the lead canes. In the spring we uncover them, by hand again, and untie them to let them grow. They don’t do that in Niagara, although they are now thinking of doing it because of the big swings in temperature we are experiencing now.

We do a low-yield kind of winemaking, which is also why we do premium winemaking, and why it’s so good. On an acre, instead of four tonnes of grapes we do one-and-a-half to two tonnes maximum, which means after all that hard work to grow the grapes, we go into the fields and cut some branches off and drop them on the ground. It’s very painful, the theory being the remaining grapes benefit and are more complex and intense. More flavour, but you only get half the amount of wine. Some people say we are crazy, but it does make for a better wine. We don’t use any pesticides or chemicals, which again takes more handwork.

Q Recently there has been an explosion of smaller wineries. There was a documentary on PBS recently about the Finger Lake District in New York State and how the wineries there have tripled in the past 10 years. The same would seem to be true of Prince Edward County. How do you account for this?

A I think it’s a reaction against globalization. I think it gives you something that is a piece of your own, that you can identify as yours. It’s part of being “of place.” You can say I went to this specific little place, and I found this winery and I tasted this great wine. Without getting too fancy about it, wine is about the place that it’s grown, the terroir, where it comes from. And it’s very specific. What we can get off our little parcel of land is a totally different taste. We could have the same variety of grapes grown in Niagara, but it is a totally different taste, a totally different wine. With large box stores, and everything being generic these days, the experience of place is important and what attracts the visitors who come here.



Q After years before the cameras and in the spotlight, do you miss it? This is quite a lifestyle change to be living out here. Do you still act?

A I do it very occasionally now, because quite frankly there are very few interesting roles to do. Both because of where the industry is at right now and because of my age. Producers like women in their late twenties, early thirties. I have done so much television, that unless the role is really interesting or challenging, I’m not interested. Life is short, right? It really is, and as you get older you realize how short it is, and as you get older you want to try something new.

Q Do you see yourself as a celebrity winemaker?

A Nooooo. (she laughs) Really, I’m not a winemaker. I don’t want to see my name on the label. As an actress I never set out to be a celebrity or star or anything like that. I just wanted to be an actor. You look at the series I’ve done, they are all ensemble pieces, whether it be “Street Legal,” “Traders” or “The Eleventh Hour.” And that’s what I like about what I am doing now, it’s like being part of a collective. •