D. D. Leobard Winery owners Denis d'Eschambault and Leonard Streilein's oak-barrelled wild blueberry wine won a gold medal at the 2006 All Canadian Wine Championships. Their latest quaff, a birch wine called Tansi, is also generating buzz but they haven't entered it into competition yet: "We're not sure what category to put it into," jokes vintner d'Eschambault. "Tree wines?"

It all started back in 2003, when Doug Eryou of Bakers Narrows, Man., approached the winery, asking if the owners could figure out a way to make wine from birch sap. Eryou explains: "I knew that birch sap was harvested here when I was growing up to make home brew, so I thought, why not wine?" Eryou supplied a rudimentary recipe from someone in B.C. along with some sap. "When I contacted Denis he was skeptical," says Eryou, who now has his own winery in the works, "but after trying a bottle from the fellow in B.C., he was encouraged."

It took D. D. Leobard "probably eight to 10 different batches and styles to perfect the product," explains d'Eschambault. Tansi's woodsy recipe is now a closely guarded secret, "but I can assure you that it is 100 per cent birch wine, made from 100 per cent boreal forest birch," he says.

Birch sap differs from maple sap in that the natural sugar found in birch is fructose instead of sucrose. The sap flow in birches comes later than maples and flows more profusely, but is only about half as sweet as maple sap. Fermentation takes about three weeks and clarification about a month. Then there's a final filtering and the wine is bottled.

And the taste? "The first time I tasted birch wine was at [wine writer] David Lawrason's house up in Belleville last summer," says Zoltan Szabo, a Toronto-based sommelier and wine consultant. "He poured it for me blind. I thought it was made from an aromatic grape -- it came across with lots of pretty floral and some spicy nuances, light and fresh on the palate." Wedge Ritcher, a product education coordinator at the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission, has said the wine "resembles a Chardonnay blended with a Sauvignon Blanc with a little something that finishes it off just right." The winery considers it to be a 1(sugar rating), meaning more of an off-dry vintage.

Since it was introduced into the Manitoba market in late 2005, the winery has sold out of each batch -- 200 additional cases have just been released. The company is also developing a sweeter, dessert-style wine.(Watch your back, ice wine.)

Although D. D. Leobard may have been the first Canadian commercial winery to successfully turn an overlooked folk recipe into what could become a new northern classic, the St. Boniface-based vintners(Manitoba's only commercial winery)weren't the first to make it. Birch wine has been quaffed since 1240 CE, when Dominican friar Albertus Magnus mentioned it. Queen Victoria also refers in her diary to silver birch wine being the favourite beverage of her beloved Prince Albert. And the curative properties of birch sap were referred to by Baron Pierre-François Percy, the army surgeon and inspector general to Napoleon, who called it "an invaluable remedy for rheumatic diseases, the after-effects of gout, bladder obstructions, and countless chronic ills." For early Aboriginal people, birch sap was an important sweetener(D. D. Leobard's name for their wine, Tansi, means "Hello, how are you?" in Cree).

Jonathan Forbes of Forbes Wild Foods, a Canadian company specializing in hand-harvested wild Canadiana treats(from marinated milkweed pods to cloudberry compote), has been selling northern Manitoba birch syrup for several years. He says the sap is big in northern Europe, where they believe in its purported(though so far unproven)health benefits: "They sell it for use on everything from freckle removal to arthritis relief." In Finland, birch sap is a popular elixir mainly sold in natural food stores; among other things, it's said to contain trace elements of potassium, calcium, amino acids, magnesium, zinc, and vitamin C, albeit in a diluted form. A fancy Nordic cosmetics line called Lumene has a new cellulite gel foam containing "bio-active ingredients from the forests of Finland," including birch sap, that it says will firm and smooth your body. "The wine does have residual anti-inflammatory properties that the tree and sap give off," offers d'Eschambault. "And as recent studies show, wine is good for you." Great taste and firmer buttocks? Cheers to that.

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