ONLY IN CANADA For a small island, Havre-aux-Maisons in Quebec’s Îles de la Madeleine boasts a disproportionate number of unique food and drink items. Most of them are not available outside of Quebec. At Le Barbocheux, Sylvie Langford and her husband Léonce make and sell homemade wines and liqueurs. Bagosse – the traditional home-brewed wine of the Îles de la Madeleine – is served as an aperitif. Sylvie and Léonce make red bagosse from raspberries and strawberries that they grow behind their house. They concoct white bagosse from local cranberries and dandelions. The couple also produces Le Chalin – a blueberry-and-berry fortified, port-style wine – and L’Ariel, an intensely flavoured raspberry liqueur and digestive for serving after dinner. “It’s also great on ice cream,” says Sylvie. We overheard one visitor buying a bottle after trying a sample. “This drink is so good that I’m not going to share it with anyone,” he said. “The name of the raspberry liqueur comes from the name of Léonce’s grandfather’s ship, L’Ariel,” explained Sylvie Langford. “It ferried passengers from Pictou, Nova Scotia to the Îles de la Madeleine between 1940 and 1950. After it was sold as a pleasure craft, it was shipwrecked.” Don’t let the name Corps Mort (Dead Body) deter you from trying this beer made by À l’abri de la Tempête! This microbrewery uses barley malt smoked in Le Fumoir D’Antan, the last smokehouse on Havre-aux-Maisons. The beer’s name refers to the salted herring hung from wooden sticks over small, maple-wood fires that gently smoke the fish and the barley malt. As a result, the dark-orange Corps Mort brew acquires a smoked aroma and the flavours of dark fruits, with hints of caramel and maple. Not a fishy taste! We discovered berry wines with equally memorable names at Newfoundland’s Auk Island Winery. Funky Puffin is a medium-sweet wine made with local blueberries and rhubarb. Moose Joose is a blueberry and partridgeberry blend, while Krooked Kod combines blueberries and raspberries. Auk Island Winery uses iceberg water to make medium-sweet wines from bakeapples (cloudberries), blueberries, raspberries and cranberries. It also combines raspberry wine with dark rum to make Outport Raspberry Screech. Have you ever tasted beer made with iceberg water? Quidi Vidi Brewery is in St. John’s, near Iceberg Alley, where hundreds of massive icebergs float south along the coast every summer. The brewery hires a company that collects bergy bits – chunks of 20,000-year-old ice that have broken off from larger icebergs – in an ice-harvesting barge. The ice goes into storage tanks, where it melts. Oxygen trapped inside the water influences the taste of the beer. Poured from cobalt-blue bottles, Iceberg Beer has a crisp, clean taste, with a natural carbonation that tickles your tongue. CSANews | WINTER 2023 | 17 Travel
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