As St. Catharines gears up for the annual Grape and Wine Festival, two Brock researchers have uncorked findings on how important wine really is to Niagara residents.

For almost two decades, Russell Johnston, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, and Michael Ripmeester, Professor in the Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, have studied how local residents identify the Niagara region.

In their recently published book, Meaningful Pasts: Historical Narratives, Commemorative Landscapes, and Everyday Lives, Niagara’s wine culture is one of two in-depth case studies.

Their research, beginning in the early 2000s, originally sought to determine if and how people engage with monuments in Niagara. With the celebrations of the War of 1812 bicentennial still on the horizon at that time, Johnston and Ripmeester started surveying St. Catharines residents on the street about what sprang to mind when they thought of Niagara.

“We both had an interest in understanding what monuments actually did, apart from what they were supposed to do, so we specifically did not use words like ‘past’ or ‘history’ when talking to Niagara residents,” says Ripmeester. “We were very much interested in whether or not people would go there — and they didn’t, at all.”

The researchers were surprised to find that wine was identified strongly as part of the region’s fabric — sometimes, even more than the iconic waterfall at Niagara Falls.

Johnston says that once wine was established as a key identifier, subsequent surveys dug into whether people believed there was any historical connection with wine. Results confirmed that wine was viewed “as part of Niagara’s agricultural heritage, and not just a contemporary industry.”

“As it developed, the wine industry did a great job of inserting itself into heritage narratives so that people were able to see it as part of a longer-term agricultural trajectory of Niagara, from small towns and family farms to wine and wineries,” says Ripmeester. “So, for all kinds of reasons, the wine industry is speaking to the people of Niagara in the sense that it gives them a positive identifier.”

The researchers say the bicentennial of the War of 1812, which fell in the midst of their research, provided an interesting counterpoint to their findings on wine. Commemoration projects and events ran from 2011 to 2014, so when Ripmeester and Johnston conducted another survey about Niagara identifiers in 2016, they expected to be able to observe the impact of this substantial investment and the extensive local media coverage surrounding it.

Almost no one mentioned it.

“Out of everyone we surveyed, one or two people mentioned the War of 1812,” says Johnston. “In 2016, we had the lowest number of respondents naming the War of 1812 out of all of our surveys dating back to the early 2000s.”

Ripmeester says they were shocked by this result.

“The federal government, the Department of National Defence, local dignitaries and historians thought it was important to give people a sound knowledge of the War of 1812 and spent tens of millions of dollars,” he says. “Yet it didn’t create a lasting impression on local people.”

Instead, wine culture, tourism, heritage and industry continued to top the survey responses throughout the project. Researchers say this is because people name what’s personally meaningful — not necessarily what officials who work to steer public memory hope to highlight.

“Narratives come in and out of relevance for people living in a particular community,” says Johnston. “People are often reaching for what’s right now.”