Obituary: Ottawa Citizen wine writer Peter Ward championed great bottles

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Late last month, when Peter Ward’s children were cleaning up the Westboro home of the late Ottawa Citizen wine columnist, they naturally came across treasured bottles in his cellar.

There were several dozen well-aged finds. There was also an unopened bottle of tremendous sentimental significance. In the early 1970s, when Ward’s children were young, they squashed the grapes that were eventually bottled.

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“It had a custom label, bottled by him on this date,” said Ward’s granddaughter, Claire Grenier.

It was too much, though, to ask for the 50-year-old home-made wine to be magnificent. “It was not drinkable,” Grenier said. “It did not age well.”

Ward, on the other hand, did. The Ottawa Citizen’s wine columnist from 1973 to 2002 died in his Kensington Avenue home on Sept. 15. He was 93.

When the Ward’s Wines column ended, reader Mary Bullock lamented: “It was sad day for wine lovers.

“Mr. Ward was a very generous person with his time and even with his own personal wine collection,” she wrote. “Mr. Ward was always available to answer personal questions and give advice on wine and he nurtured an appreciation of wine among his readers.”

A year after Ward ended his column, he published his book Don’t Spit the Good Stuff.

But Ward, a veteran journalist who was born in Toronto, would later say that his greatest accomplishment was helping to save the HMCS Haida, the famous Second World War warship that is now a National Historic Site in Hamilton, Ont.

In 1964, when Ward was a reporter for the Toronto Telegram, he cornered then-Prince Philip during a Royal Tour that visited Quebec City and asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he would become the patron of the Haida, which was destined to be scrapped.

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Then, Ward was one of five men who bought the warship for $20,000, hoping to preserve it. To pay his share, Ward had mortgaged his house.

Prince Philip was amenable, and his support helped Ward’s group succeed in rescuing the destroyer, which in 2018 was named the ceremonial flagship of the Royal Canadian Navy.

Ward had personal reasons to save the Haida. In 1944, when Ward was scarcely in his teen years, his father, Leslie, was one of 128 people who died aboard HMCS Athabaskan when it was sunk by the Germans off France’s Breton coast. It was the Haida that rescued many of the Athabaskan’s survivors. Ward also became a naval reservist.

At the age of 21, Ward began working at the Toronto Telegram. He rose from covering the notorious Toronto bank robber Alonzo Boyd to reporting from Fidel Castro’s Cuba and war-torn Vietnam. Eventually, he was assigned to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa.

When the Telegram folded in 1971, Ward struck out on his own as a freelancer. Ward News Services reported on Canadian politics for news outlets around the world, and in the mid-1970s, Ward hosted the CBC Radio show Capital Report.

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By then, he had already begun writing about wine for the Citizen, hired by the newspaper’s then-entertainment editor Noel Taylor.

“I knew diddly-squeak about wine,” Ward told this newspaper in 2002. “Sure, I made wine in the basement and I liked to drink the stuff, but that was about it. But Noel said he wanted somebody who could write well and wasn’t afraid to learn in public. So, there I was.”

Over the years, Ward documented the rise of the wine industry in North America. When his column debuted, the Ontario Liquor Control Board operated stores where consumers had to fill out chits and pass them across a counter to a clerk who would fetch bottles, sometimes of dubious quality, and wrap them in plain paper.

In 2002, Michael Mondavi, chairman of Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley, told this newspaper that Ward “watched California emerge as a premier wine-growing region. We salute his passion for wine and wonderful ability in communicating it to others.”

Ward was a huge fan of Canadian wineries and said his biggest thrill as a wine writer was being able to watch the evolution and maturing of Canadian wines.

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“In the early 1970s, Ontario wines were awful,” Ward said in 2002. “They were either sickly sweet or they had this horrible concord grape taste… But now we’re producing world-class, award-winning wines.”

Meanwhile, Ottawa had become a bright spot for wine appreciation in Canada, Ward said, in part because military personnel and diplomats posted abroad returned home with a taste for good wine.

Ward’s passion for wine led him to travel widely, to wineries in Italy, California, Spain, France, Portugal, Chile, South Africa, Germany, Georgia, Iran and Tunisia.

On Facebook, Sandor Johnson, proprietor and winemaker of Potter Settlement Artisan Wines in Tweed, wrote late last month that Ward had given him a 6,000-year-old wine amphora that he had procured in Cyprus.

“Together we used dental picks to scrape out the 6000-year-old wine residue. We got it to re-ferment to make us a vintage that tastes incredible, which someday we will debut at our winery,” Johnson wrote.

“Not a lot of 93-year-old guys out there as fun as my friend.”

In Ottawa, Ward was a fixture in Westboro, said his granddaughter. He and his wife Jane, who died in 2015, hosted neighbours on their patio for drinks every day before dinner. “They created quite a community on the street,” Grenier said.

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Ward also frequented nearby restaurants such as the Won Ton House, the Newport and Petit Bill’s Bistro.

Randy Fitzpatrick, the owner of Petit Bill’s Bistro, said Ward had his last lunch of fish and chips there last month. Fitzpatrick, who took Algonquin College’s sommelier program in 2004, said he met Ward at that time.

“He was just a fine gentlemen. I was happy enough to consider him a friend,” Fitzpatrick said.

Grenier said her grandfather “survived a lot. He had throat cancer, was diagnosed as diabetic since 1975 and lasted much longer than he thought he would, than we thought he would.

“He was an interesting, bold and brilliant man with a great life,” Grenier said. “He was getting to a point where he could pass on and see the next thing.” 

In addition to Grenier, Ward is survived by his three children and three other grandchildren.

phum@postmedia.com

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