Ziraldo brings an authentic taste of Italy to Niagara

Having been one of the founding pioneers of Niagara’s wine industry, knocking down doors worldwide to popularize icewine, one might think Donald Ziraldo would be done with innovations. But with the release of his new Ziraldo Prosecco, that notion can be laid to rest. 

The fruity, refreshing, lightly sparkling new wine, available to purchase locally at the Pie Plate in Virgil and at the LCBO’s Vintages store on Vansickle Road in St. Catharines, was produced in Italy from Glera grapes grown about 90 minutes northeast of Venice. 

Ziraldo Prosecco becomes the first officially recognized wine with the Prosecco designation from a Niagara-based producer, one who is linked to an area of Italy that is near and dear to his heart. 

Ziraldo’s father Fiorello emigrated to Canada from Fagagna in that same Friuli region of Italy in 1923. On a trip back to Fagagna in 1947, he met and fell in love with his future wife, Irma. The pair travelled back to St. Catharines where they began working on a farm that Fiorello had recently bought there. 

The rest of Donald Ziraldo’s story - working with winemaker Karl Kaiser and other local growers to plant vinifera grapes, starting Inniskillin Wines and becoming the face of Niagara’s icewine industry around the world - has often been written about. And on some of those travels to promote wines he often brought his parents with him.

Ziraldo remembers once visiting a nun, a family relative who lived in a monastery in the town of Valdobbiadene, on one of those trips back to northern Italy. Valdobbiadene is the epicentre of the production of Prosecco, the largest selling wine from Italy. 

When Ziraldo’s longtime friend Mario Schwenn, the former proprietor of the Dievole Estate in the Chianti region of Tuscany, recently turned to him for help selling some of his brands outside of Italy, one particular brand stood out. 

“I looked at the list of wines he wanted help with,” Ziraldo recounts. “Out of the five, one was a Valdobbiadene Prosecco. I took that as a message, maybe from my parents, and I told him that was the one I wanted to work with.”

So rather than just helping him sell the wine, Ziraldo took out a lease on a vineyard on the Al Canevon Estate, a 40 hectares hill between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene that holds a UNESCO world heritage site distinction. 

“I control the vineyard, and my winemaker, Fabio, makes the wine,” explains Ziraldo. “The first time I tasted it, it was so fresh. He was trained as a brewmaster and a winemaster. He explained that the big difference is winemakers make wine and put it in a barrel. As a brewmaster, he takes the wine out of a big tank, bottles it, and the sooner it gets to the customer the better.”

The Charmat winemaking method has earned Ziraldo Prosecco a DOCG (denominazione di origine controllata e garantita) designation, the highest classification in Italy. 

Wine critics and sommeliers have been impressed. The first vintage of Ziraldo Prosecco won a 2022 Sommeliers Choice Awards silver medal. It received a 91 rating from Wine Align and Canadian wine expert Natalie MacLean calls it “a refreshing dry Prosecco with a lively mousse, so easy to love and enjoy to either toast in your holiday guests or to pair with brunch dishes like eggs Benedict and salads.”

Ziraldo left Inniskillin in 2006, three months after the winery was sold to Constellation Brands. It’s now part of Arterra Wines Canada. The Member of the Order of Canada continued to produce riesling icewine under his own label in a partnership with Klaus Reif, but in 2019 moved that production back to Inniskillin, where it all began. 

He maintains a small riesling vineyard there and purchases vidal grapes from other growers to produce his two varieties of icewines. And he continues to promote both his own Ziraldo icewine and icewine in general around the world. 

He tells The Local that less than a month ago he had to miss a special pouring of the new Ziraldo Prosecco at a Woodbridge-area Vintages store, one of 268 LCBO locations that sell the wine. Instead, he was in Las Vegas for the Formula 1 Grand Prix where his 2019 Ziraldo Vidal Icewine was featured at a charity event hosted by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté.

But it’s his “Italian blood in Canadian skin”, as he says, that is driving his forays into the Friuli countryside as of late. The new Prosecco follows his Ziraldo Bianco Di Fagagna, a picolit wine first vinted in 2008 in the same Friuli region where he was given an honorary citizenship in 2004.

He remains politically involved, still hoping to one day witness the building of a mid-peninsula highway atop the escarpment and looking forward to seeing what comes of the provincial government’s review of governance coming this January. 

But most importantly, he remains an ambassador and a storyteller. And no one can deny that there’s a great story behind his new Ziraldo Prosecco.

“It’s from my homeland, and that’s the interesting part of the story,” says Ziraldo, “To sell a wine, you need a good story, and you can’t get much better than this.”