Cuvée 2008

Niagara, Friday, February 29, 2008

A friend of mine is a chef. He was born in Europe but chose to live in Canada over 20 years ago.

Once a month, he invites a few friends and other guests to join him around his table. They come from vastly different backgrounds, their origins as diverse as the face of Canada itself; a group that only his warm hospitality could bring together.

The evening begins in the kitchen, with the choice of foods and the preparation of dishes. As soon as you enter his home, the aromas wafting through the air give you a clue as to who will be joining you around the table: a Sephardic Jew, a Lebanese, a South American, a Frenchman, a Haitian…

My friend uses only locally grown food products. By this I mean the foodstuffs produced here in Canada, particularly Quebec where he lives; his culinary tour de force is the ability to uncover as many different tastes in Canada’s products as there are cultural origins around his table.

His botanical knowledge has led him to discover Egypt in the Laurentians and the Caribbean near Lake Ontario. In Canada’s seasons he has discovered the wide-ranging geography of flavours of world cuisine. Cooking, for him, is a vehicle for sharing cultures.

But his table is not simply a place to tantalize your taste buds. First and foremost, it is a place to meet and share conversation, a place where ideas meld as easily as the flavours.

At a time when, too often, each of us thinks more of ourselves than the other, when imagination and initiative take a back seat to the daily hustle and bustle, when fast food and ready-made meals serve as culinary rituals, it is reassuring to have someone to remind us of the central place that the table holds as a cultural forum for exchange, heedless of our differences.

Cooking is at once a lesson in geography and library sciences, flora and fauna, the customs and history of a country; it can be a place of refuge or one of exile.

Around the table can be heard tall tales of great adventure and simple words of welcome; on the table, the food itself conveys a message: when we break bread together, we are sharing the best that life has to offer, not trying to subdue or outdo one another.

The table then becomes a place where local spirit intermingles with the memories and experiences of the exile. As the chef recites:

Every man is an island

Every island, a treasure

A land of exile

A country waiting for the dawn

Through the fire of poetry, I create.

Ah, fire! It can bring ingredients together, transform disorder into harmony, accelerate those hidden particles to combine what the cold would keep apart.

Fire can be a catalyst for convergence, can forge alliances and reveal new bonds between oneself and another. For indeed disorder inspires great cuisine, just as blending builds strong cultures. It implies a shared space and individual communities, places of cultural exchange and interaction, as cities like Sarajevo, Salonika, Istanbul, Baghdad have done in the past.

In Canada, such blending is taking place or could take place in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver—places of tolerance and cross-cultural harmony, like a country without ghettos.

Fear must be driven out of the mix. It is blending that makes wine. Why would our societies not do what winemakers have done for so long? Noah, the original oenophile and cook, found a way to achieve harmony amidst the chaos on his Arc. We could all learn from him and find common ground among so many varied cultures.

It was in this spirit two years ago, here at Cuvée, that I proposed that we create an award to celebrate our nation’s table. Your response was so enthusiastic that development of the idea quickly picked up momentum.

I had only to convince my wife (with no real difficulty, I assure you) of the need to add such an award to the prestigious Governor General’s awards for the performing arts, visual and media arts, architecture, and literature.

At Cuvée 2007, I gave you a progress report. During our official visits, we had discussions with people across the country representing the various professional categories associated with wine and food. Everywhere we went, we were met with the same enthusiasm for the project. This consultation phase ended last month in the Okanagan Valley.

Since then, at Rideau Hall, an internal committee has been diligently working to structure and formalize the process to set up the internal and external mechanisms for the project.

And so today, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have entered the final design and production phase for the Governor General’s Award in Celebration of the Nation’s Table, with the firm hope that we will be presenting the first awards in 2009.

Now, to show you that we mean business, and to keep a promise that I made last year, I, as patron of Cuvée 2008, have invited the Governor General of Canada to join us this evening and, above all, to lend me her support.

Thank you and long live the Cuvée!