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Jan 15,2006 - Jan 22,2006 |
28 - Order of Canada recipient Donald Zirlado, a Canadian or Friulan origins, co-founded Inniskillin Wines
When destiny is etched on a ring
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-22
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Donald Ziraldo
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Donald Ziraldo, do you care to explain why you, a man whose parents hail from Friuli, have a Canadian name?
"It was my father's idea. 'I want our son to be half Italian and half Canadian. That way he'll be successful,' he once told my mother. So here I am: my first name is Canadian, but my last name is Italian."
And the good thing is that his father's prophecy has come true: on May 7 Donald Ziraldo was awarded the country's highest honor: the Order of Canada. It's the crowning of a life intensely devoted to work, but especially to a winning idea: producing high-class wines in spite of those who thought, or still think, that the Canadian climate is ill-suited for grape growing.
Niagara Falls-based Inniskillin Wines Inc. is the living refutation of this belief.
He did not follow in his father's footsteps. Actually, a veritable abyss runs between Ziraldo's and his late father's occupations. And abyss is the right word, since his father used to work in the MacIntyre gold mines of Timmins, in northern Ontario. Ziraldo himself, on the other hand, works on the surface, among rows of grapevines in the sweet climate of the Niagara Peninsula.
Why did you decide to become a wine maker?
"Look at this," he says displaying a gold ring he wears. "It was made with the gold that my father used to mine. My mother gave it to me when I graduated in Agronomy from the University of Guelph, in 1971... My father had already passed away, and in giving the ring to me, my mother told me: 'He would have wanted to give it to you himself.' At that time I had not decided which branch of Agronomy to pursue. I took the ring and I saw a grapple of grapes carved on it.
"If I am where I am, it's partly thanks to this ring. In a sense, it held within it my destiny."
The Ziraldo family, who hail from Fagagna ("In my house we still speak furlān," says Ziraldo), a town in Friuli nestled by rolling hills crested with rows of vineyards surrounding the town of San Daniele. Which is the town instantly associated with Italian ham and tajųt, but which is also a place of emigrants. Thousands of people from Bassa to Carnia, from the sea to Tarvisio, have left this land in search of work abroad. The people from Friuli have built the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Copenhagen Royal Palace, skyscrapers in New York and entire blocks in Buenos Aires. And they have dug the subway line in Toronto and the mines of northern Ontario.
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