Sommelier finds beauty in wine labels.
Alain Laliberte is a collector of wine labels, as well as the faces of wine crates that adorn the walls of his basement.
Staff photo/ IAN KELSO
Sommelier Alain Laliberte has shared some exciting news with Guinness World Records.
He has amassed an estimated 160,000 wine labels in his Etobicoke bungalow, what he believes to be the largest collection of wine labels in the world.
Laliberte, 50, has enjoyed a quarter-century love affair with wine — and its vast array of labels.
It was a month-long sommelier course after the completion of his studies at Institut de tourisme et d’hotellerie du Quebec in Montreal in 1986 that ignited his interest in wine. In 1989, a job as food and beverage controller at the Meridien Hotel in Montreal introduced him to wine producers’ agencies, wine tastings — and by extension, wine labels.
He was hooked.
“In 1987, I wrote to the (wine importing) agencies and asked, ‘Can you send me labels for the wines you represent?’ Most of the agencies in Quebec replied. I got big stacks of labels coming by mail,” Laliberte recalled, the excitement more than two decades later still ringing in his voice.
His collection had begun.
Today, the faces of wine crates stretch floor to ceiling on the basement family room walls in Laliberte’s home. Each is branded with the name of the estate and the year of the vintage.
He started collecting them in 1988. There are wines represented from France, Italy, Spain.
Chateau Ferriere 1999. Chateau Saint-Pierre 1982.
After his collection began, he extended his label ask to agencies in Ontario and British Columbia. Then even farther, to France, Australia and other countries. He sent all the requests by mail in the age before email existed.
“It became more important and more important. I’ve learned to classify them. If you don’t start good organizing, you will be in trouble when you have more and more and more because you have to undo the classification,” he said, sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Got Wine?’ on it.
“If you put everything under ‘France’ eventually you will have to split for Burgundy, the Loire Valley, Bordeaux area, Champagne area, the Beaujolais area. What do you do if you didn’t start properly?”
The labels are meticulously catalogued, by country, alphabetically by classification and producer and by region, in large binders and in shoe boxes.
There are boxes for Algeria, Germany, Morocco, even Italy.
But eventually, as certain wine regions grow in importance, their labels earn their own book, such as Tuscany and Veneto.
Guinness World Records has an existing record on file for the largest collection of wine labels.
The record is held by Sophia Vaharis of Athens, Greece, who since 1984 has collected 15,255 different labels from champagne and wine bottles. Her label collection represents a total of 50 different countries.
A Guinness World Records spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Guardian it has sent Laliberte a request with specific guidelines as to the type of documentation it requires in order to verify his claim of having the world’s largest collection of wine labels.
He is working to provide them that documentation.
In 2009, his collection reached 55,000 labels.
Then a man who no longer wanted his collection gave him 2,000 labels from 2000 to 2009 vintages.
Then the widow of his friend Pierre Saint-Aubin in Montreal gave Laliberte nearly the entirety of her late husband’s wine label collection. It numbered an astonishing 125,000 labels.
“Wine is about three things. History, culture and geography. The wine label should be representative of those three things,” explains Laliberte, who is a sommelier, wine writer and wine appraiser who has taught college courses on wine at George Brown and Humber.
Laliberte opens a letter he received in the mail. It’s a wine label from an Australian producer. He’ll keep the stamp for a stamp-collector friend and file his new label in his Australia box.
Asking the Quebec native if he has a favourite label is a little like asking a parent if they have a favourite child.
Each label is unique. He appreciates them all.
Some are stark. Others boast a painting, sometimes of the producer’s vineyard, a port, a castle, an animal.
However, he does have a sentimental favourite, the Chateau Rauzan-Segla 1995. He worked at that estate in 1995 and 1996 when he studied wines at the Faculte d’Oenologie de Bordeaux.
“Works of art,” is how he describes Swiss wine labels.
His wine label collection is complemented with an enviable collection of hard cover books on wine, atlases with maps by wine region, even tomes that illustrate and analyze the labels themselves.
Le Livre de L’Etiquette de Vin by Georges Renoy contains photos of labels from the famous Chateau Mouton-Rothschild dating back to 1864. One 1973 wine label is a reproduction of a Picasso painting.
Laliberte loves his labels. He pulls out shoe boxes labelled with Algeria-Luxembourg, England, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Korea, Egypt, even Ethiopia written on them.
Brazilian labels scream colour. One has a matador and bull on it. The names of some Chinese wines evoke the culture: Dragon Seal and Dynasty.
When asked if Ethiopia really makes wine, he exclaims “Yes!” with a wide grin.
He gingerly handles the Yugoslavian wine labels due to its historic significance: “There are no wines from Yugoslavia anymore. It’s a part of history. Yugoslavia existed. It doesn’t anymore.”
The avid label collector doesn’t just gain his paper gems in the mail.
He has developed a method to remove labels from wine bottles.
To remove a label, he either soaks bottles in warm water in the kitchen sink in his basement. Or he removes the cap and places a bottle in a 225 F oven for 10 minutes then uses a fine knife to coax its label free.
His ultimate goal: to complete a collection with labels from each of Burgundy’s more than 500 climats, which are plots of land with precisely defined limits benefiting from specific geological and climatic conditions.
Laliberte’s passion for wine and its labels seems boundless.
“The more you know about wine, the less you know because there is so much to discover. It’s amazing. How fascinating it is to be able to do this for a living. It’s fantastic.”