How a Ladybug Became Malivoire's Trademark

The most recognizable thing on a Malivoire bottle was named by a kid.

She was the daughter of the winery's first winemaker, and she was there for a demonstration of the first rosé the winery ever made. She said she wished it could be called Ladybug. The winery's telling of the story guesses she was going off the colour, which is as good a theory as anyone has. Martin Malivoire, who had bought the land on the Beamsville Bench with Moira Saganski in 1995, sketched the bug by hand, and it became the winery's trademark.

A child named it, the vineyard made it true

That is the whole origin, and it's less romantic than most label stories. A kid said a name out loud and it stuck. What kept it from being a cute accident is what was already going on out in the rows.

The vineyard is home to over a quarter of a million ladybugs, and Malivoire keeps releasing more of them rather than spraying. They work through the grapevine leafhoppers. A ladybug eats a narrow menu. A spray clears out the whole insect population, and the vineyard comes back more exposed the following season. So the bug on the bottle is a fair picture of how the fruit gets grown. The first Ladybug Rosé, in 1998, was Cabernet Franc and Gamay with a small addition of barrel-aged Chardonnay, and it sold for $14.95 CAD.

The year "ladybug" became a dirty word in Ontario

Then a different insect showed up. The Asian lady beetle arrived in southern Ontario in 2001, following migrating aphids, and it got into the grapes at harvest. It secretes methoxypyrazines, and even small amounts wreck the flavour of the wine. The 2001 vintage carried it. The Globe and Mail reported that three of four Rieslings sampled from that harvest tasted of peanuts.

That beetle had nothing to do with the red-and-black ladybug on the Malivoire label. Buyers didn't make the distinction. For a stretch, the word itself was bad news on a wine shelf in Ontario, which is its own small lesson about how Canadian wine gets judged.

What happened to the label

At the LCBO's urging, Malivoire took the Ladybug name and the bug off its best-known wine. Both were back within the year. For those months Malivoire sold its most recognizable wine stripped of the two things people recognized it by. The wine recovered. The winery says Ladybug is the top seller among all Vintners Quality Alliance rosés at the LCBO.

A winery built to run downhill

Malivoire made the same kind of choice with the building. Across the property, the Beamsville Bench drops about thirty feet, roughly nine metres, and Malivoire built into that slope. The winery went up in 1998 inside a recycled Quonset hut, seven levels of it, and it was the first gravity-flow winery in Ontario. Juice and wine move from one stage to the next on the slope alone, with no pumps anywhere in the process.

Gravity handles the fruit gently, and it costs time. Malivoire committed a whole building to that trade.

What the vineyard teaches, if you let it

Shiraz Mottiar arrived two years after the winery opened, hired as a cellarhand. A business degree came first, then Brock University's Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute. He'd come to wine partly because his first name is a grape and he decided to read that as fate. He graduated in the institute's founding class, and he's the winery's Director of Winegrowing now.

When we asked him what the vineyard had taught him, he went to a block of Gamay:

"The vineyard really does teach you, if you are paying attention. The Courtney block at the Malivoire Estate really showed that if you watch and listen, you can really showcase something special. The Gamay growing in the Courtney block showed from its first vintage that it was truly different than the rest of the Gamay that had been planted at the same time. We saw these differences, smaller, darker fruit, and allowed it to follow that path."

He was describing fruit, not a label. The Courtney Gamay is now farmed differently from every other Gamay they grow, on the strength of what one block did in its first year.

Worth knowing before you open the bottle

None of this changes what's in the glass, and we'd be overselling it if we said otherwise. It changes what you're holding on the way there. That bug has been on the label longer than Shiraz Mottiar has worked there. We're aware, by the way, that a winery whose trademark is an insect and whose building runs without pumps sounds like a story we made up to sell wine. We didn't invent either one.

Malivoire is our featured winery this September, so there's a good chance one is headed to your table shortly. That month matters more to a winery than most people assume, which we've written about in how a subscription supports local wineries. Have a look at what the boxes hold next if you want to see where we go after this.