I was thinking today, as we tried Amber Kitchen + Coffee for the first time (it was pretty good — we shared the Merguez skillet and the burrata salad) that most of the places opening near us are breakast-minded. Masa has been an incredible neighbourhood option for breakfast sammies. La Bamboche was once brunch fav Lil’ Baci, and has returned to its breakfast-y roots. Leslieville Pumps (RIP) is apparently being replaced by Ramona’s Kitchen, which seems to have a brunch focus.

Luckily, if we need a serious dinner, we have Ricky + Olivia, which was just honored with a Michelin Bib Gourmand designation.

Back in July WineAlign (to which I subscribe, and have for years) posted the results of the National Wine Awards of Canada. Each day they posted the bottles of one or more varieties which had been awarded Bronze, Silver, Gold (usually), and Platinum (rarely). A bunch of textual information leaking out daily is a hard way to spot any trends, so I did what anyone who loves both wine and spreadsheets would: I loaded it all into Google Sheets.

First, a few notes on how I handled the data:

• The ‘score’ metric I refer to below is my calculation and not WineAlign’s. For each wine I assigned a score of 1 for a bronze, 2 for a silver, 3 for a gold, and 5 for a platinum.
• I excluded mead, cider, and fruit wine.
• They don’t publish how many of each wine type are submitted, just how many win awards, so I can’t determine any kind of efficiency metric per winery or region.

What I noticed:

No surprise: BC and Ontario dominate. BC wines were awarded 432 times, Ontario 423, confirming their position as the premier wine provinces in the country. But Nova Scotia won 15 and Quebec won 13, including in some vinifera categories, which is promising. Plenty of wineries in emerging regions (especially in BC) won awards too, not just the couple biggest in each province.

The same grapes tend to do well nationwide. BC’s top types were Pinot Noir, Red Blends, Chardonnay, Syrah/Shiraz, and Riesling. Ontario’s tops were Chardonnay, Sparkling, Red Blends, Riesling, and Pinot Noir. Sparkling was actually the 6th-most-awarded BC wine too, so apart from Syrah doing well in BC (natch) the most-awarded wines were just about the same. Quebec and Nova Scotia each had Chards and Rieslings awarded as well.

The benches show their strength. For the two largest regions (Niagara, Okanagan) where appellation was sometimes listed on the wine, a few stood out. In BC, the Naramata Bench had nearly 3x the number of winners as Okanagan Falls, the next closest. Meanwhile, in Niagara, the Beamsville Bench had the most awards.

Inniskillin? Inniskillin! When I calculated the total (not average) score by winery, the highest score went to…Inniskillin. I kind of love this; in my two years working at Arterra I told whoever would listen that Inniskillin was our secret weapon, considering most people only know them for icewine. Granted, most of their wines were awarded silver or bronze, but they produced Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, and Cab Franc which garnered gold, plus a Platinum icewine, so…go check them out.

OK, fine, Mission Hill. Mission Hill had the highest average score among their awarded wines, according to my calculation…which, again, is mine; I don’t know how WineAlign did it. But there must have been something similar in our calculations, since they awarded Mission Hill Winery of the Year.

Platinums. Thirty wines were awarded platinum, across 24 wineries. Six wineries had two platinum wines each: 1 Mill Road, Laughing Stock, Meyer, Mission Hill, SpearHead, and Trius. Seven different kinds of wine were awarded platinum; I will say, I’m shocked that not one Ontario Pinot or Chard was awarded platinum.

• Cab Franc: BC 3, ON 3
• Red Blends: BC 2, ON 4
• Pinot Noir: BC 5, ON 0
• Chardonnay: BC 4, ON 0
• Riesling: BC 1, ON 3
• Syrah: BC 3, ON 0
• Icewine: BC 0, ON 2

I like retronyms. Not quite as much as I like a good portmanteau, but they’re still pretty interesting. It’s been fun to see some emerge in my lifetime (e.g., landline phone or snail mail) while others I used for my whole life without ever thinking about it (e.g., cloth diaper or acoustic guitar).

Lately I’ve been thinking about this article — Coffee Is No Longer The Most Important Part of Coffee by Anna Maria Arriaga (link) — and thinking there’s another retronym around the corner.

The article, as the title suggests, talks about how coffee culture is evolving from its third wave — single origin coffee, pour overs, nerds arguing about burr vs. blade grinders, and so on — is giving way to a fourth wave where the coffee is incidental to the coffee drink, giving way to foams, sweeteners, flavour syrups, etc.

“In short, coffee’s fourth wave is defined by everything other than the coffee itself. Maximalist add-ins, flavor combinations, and iced drinks naturally gain popularity when the coffee industry attempts to appeal to younger generations.”

Given this, I think some retronym will emerge to distinguish third-wave coffee. We already had “regular coffee” to distinguish it from decaf, but I’d argue decaf was and is more of the exception, so I’m not sure I’d count that. “Black coffee” was kind of a retronym I suppose, though I read it as more of a stated option.

We also had “drip coffee” which was meant to distinguish from espresso-based drinks, once those became dominant, so there’s that. But I suspect we’re going to end up with something more broadly representing third wave coffee-forward coffee drinks in all forms — that is, the usual lineup at any third wave coffee shop. (Roughly: drip, espresso, cappuccino, latte, maybe a cortado if they fancy.) What that’ll be, I’m not sure — “third wave” is way too clunky.

Maybe this has already happened and I’m just not inside-coffee enough to know. I just like guessing where retronyms are likely to emerge.

Next up: search results.