“Don't worry - I’ve done it all: I’ve choked and coughed my wine out on the table, I’ve dribbled it onto my chin and drooled into my lap.”

This post is about my experiences learning about wine at the Wine & Spirits Education Trust’s Level 1 course held in St. John’s in October. In a nutshell: it was a blast. We tasted wine from 9am to 5pm on a Sunday. We were taught by Erin Turke, former sommelier at the beloved Raymonds, about why to pass up a Pinot Grigio and hail a Riesling,  about pairing a Sauternes with a jube-jube, about why you shouldn't eat spicey food with a Barolo. In fact learned so much about wine on that windy autumn Sunday in October that I find it genuinely hard to believe the attendance was so low: only seven people showed! So I’m going to share a thing or two about the secrets us lucky seven were let in on.

“In Newfoundland, fish means codfish and nothing else.”

So goes a passage in The New Founde Lande, Farley Mowat’s loving memoir and history of Newfoundland. I had picked up the dusty hardcover from a used bookstore in Ottawa. Something to read on my trip back home to the island. But reading that passage got me thinking. I had never been jigging for codfish in my life. What kind of Newfoundlander was I? Later I found out that lots of Newfoundlanders these days have never been jigging, but at that moment I was struck with inspiration. “B'y jeezus,” I thought, “I need to go out and catch a fish.” And so that’s exactly what I did. This post is about the Atlantic Cod and what I learned from the Newfoundland food fishery. (Turns out, a lot.)

The Atlantic cod is at home in the icy banks of the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s got antifreeze in its blood. A beautiful fish: leopard spots and on olive green back, white belly and a long elegant stripe down its flank that streamlines it with the frigid water. Five fins that unfurl like the sails of schooners that used to fish for them on the Grand Banks. An idiosyncratic whisker-like barbel sticks off its chin. King of the whitefish, its flesh is the purest white you’ll ever see. From the Vikings and Basques right up to modern North American and European fishing fleets, cod has been fished off Newfoundland for over a thousand years. Cod trade with Europe is what lured the first inhabitants to Newfoundland’s rocky harbors. Which begs the question: is there any single animal more important to Newfoundland than the cod?