Carmen Musca of Musca Wine Pressing and Supplies Ltd. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

For more than a decade, Carmen and Silvano Musca have dreamed of opening a winery on the fringe of Ottawa's "Little Italy" in the concrete jungle of Somerset Street.

By their calculations, they have sunk $750,000 into the project, tearing down an old locksmith's workshop that stood on the site and replacing it with a state-of-the-art, fully-equipped winery building.

They haven't given up on their dream, but they have been thwarted by successive Ontario Conservative and Liberal governments. Today, the winery serves only as storage space, as it has for almost 10 years since it was built and equipped.

The province's position is that such a winery would be unfair competition to the province's grape growers and wine producers, mostly in the Niagara region. It's possible, too, provincial politicians want to preserve the provincial government's near-monopoly on sale of alcohol through the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

Still, the Muscas operate a booming wine-making business in their retail store next door to the proposed winery. How come? They run a do-it-yourself operation, in which customers make and bottle their own wine, either at home or in the store. The Muscas sell the wine-making supplies and provide the necessary expertise to customers who elect to make their wine in the store.

The Muscas' business was started by Silvano's parents as a fruit and vegetable store in "Little Italy" more than 50 years ago, with home-made wine-making supplies sold as a sideline. Carmen and Silvano Musca first applied to the province in the early 1990s to open a winery next to their wine-making equipment store on Somerset Street. At first, they say, provincial officials encouraged them. After the couple built the winery, they were informed new regulations only permitted wineries near vineyards.

Just across Somerset Street from Musca Wine Pressing & Supplies, there is a branch of the Wine Exchange. It is one of four such stores in the city where customers not only make their own wine and exchange it among themselves, thereby enjoying a wider variety of wines. This exchange policy also enables customers to swap a wine they make and then find they don't like.

Over the past 11 years, some of the Wine Exchange's competitors have wondered about the legality of this wine swapping among customers. Several years ago, provincial prosecutors charged operators of the Wine Exchange with serving alcohol without a licence. But the charges did not stick.

Today, the Wine Exchange's operators contend they comply with laws governing alcohol sales by scrupulously segregating the wine-making and wine-exchange operations. Customers make their wine in one part of the store, and then go next door to exchange wine in a club, which they joined when they began to make their first batch of wine.

Welcome to the curious world of Ontario liquor laws, where no one seems 100-per-cent sure what is, or should be, allowed.

When it comes to wine-making, the province's position is this: You can make your own wine – thereby avoiding most of the tax usually collected on wine – but we won't make it easy for you.

I visited Defalco's do-it-yourself wine-making store in Bell's Corners to see how true this is. Defalco's is a thriving wine-making store, which recently opened its third branch in the city, in Orleans.

The minimum quantity of wine I could make for myself was 28 bottles, the helpful Defalco's store clerk said. Could I taste this type of wine first to see if I liked it? No, that's against provincial regulations, I was told. Could I swap some of my bottles with wine made by other customers? No, that, too, is against provincial regulations.

My next stop was the Wine Exchange store at Bank Street and Walkley Road. For a $10 annual membership fee, I could make and swap all the wine I wanted, store manager Sheldon Taylor said.

First, every Wine Exchange customer must make a batch of wine, which is usually 28 bottles, and pay for that quantity and quality of wine. The wine-making process usually takes four to six weeks. The price depends on the quality of the grape juice from which the wine is made.

Once the wine is made and paid for, the customer heads next door to the members-only section, where dozens of varieties of wine line the shelves, just as in an LCBO store. As a club member, the buyer can now taste a variety of wines made by other members. The buyer is not required to take any of the wine he or she has made. Now or later, the customer can take away one or more bottles of wine, up to the value of the batch that he or she made.

Wine you make yourself costs about half what you would pay in an Ontario liquor store for wine of the same quality, says Mr. Taylor.

Carmen Musca says: "The wines our customers make are much better than they could afford to buy in the LCBO. Our customers may pay $6 a bottle for wine comparable to one costing $15 or more in the liquor store." The do-it-yourself wine-making business is "booming, increasing every year because the product is so good," she adds.

by Michael Prentice

Special to the Ottawa Business Journal