Caribou is a sweet Québécois alcoholic beverage composed of red wine, hard liquor (usually whisky), and maple syrup or sugar. Caribou can be made at home but is now available as a premixed beverage by the Société des alcools du Québec. It can be consumed hot or cold depending on the weather and served with citrus and cinnamon in the manner of mulled wine. Cloves and nutmeg are also commonly added to flavour the drink. The beverage has numerous variations but it is usually made by mixing: These two are usually combined with a proportion of 75% to 25%, respectively, and sweetened with maple syrup or sugar as desired. The drink has been traditionally served at the Quebec Winter Carnival, where it is carried around by carnival goers in hollow plastic walking canes[4][3] or available at outdoor bars at the event.[5] In recent years, it has also been served in celebration on the National holiday of Quebec. It is also a staple of the Festival du Voyageur in Winnipeg, Manitoba,[6] where it is sometimes served in glasses made out of ice.

Caribou is supposed to have derived its name from a drink consisting of a mixture of caribou blood and whisky which was consumed by hunters and loggers in colonial times to stave off the cold when working. ^ a b cThe SAQ, Quebec’s liquor retail system, now offers a loyalty program: “SAQ Inspire.” It’s odd for a monopoly to have a loyalty program: consumers don’t have to be persuaded to be loyal to a monopoly, because they have no other place to shop. “Inspire” is a very modest program in terms of benefits. You get five points for every dollar you spend and you can redeem 1,000 points for a dollar off a purchase. Spending $200 to get a dollar off doesn’t strike me as very generous. But there are bonus offers, such as 500 or 750 points for this or that wine and, for a while during October, five times the points when you buy a Quebec product. It appears that the main purpose of “Inspire” is not to save consumers money, but to give the SAQ a means of tracking their buying patterns so that they can e-mail targeted offers.

It looks like a program that benefits the SAQ more than consumers. Coming back to the “monopoly” question, the SAQ, like the LCBO, doesn’t have a pure monopoly on wine sales. In Quebec you can buy wine in supermarkets, corner stores, from agents, and directly from the province’s wineries. And, of course, if you live close to the Ontario border you can shop at the LCBO, where wines are generally cheaper than at the SAQ. (Some LCBO stores, like the one in Hawkesbury, do nearly all their business with customers from Quebec.) But although wine consumers in Ontario are fond of pointing out that their Quebec counterparts are able to buy wine outside the SAQ, the reality is that supermarket and dépanneur (corner store) wines are usually mediocre, and fall well short of SAQ offerings in range and quality. They are marketed so that they don’t compete with the SAQ. Supermarket and dépanneur wines are imported in bulk and bottled in Quebec, which are not problems in themselves.

But they are sold without any reference to appellation, vintage, or grape variety. That is, with half a dozen exceptions, the label cannot give that information. And the brands are invented by the SAQ, so that an Australian shiraz might be called Bandycoot Breath, a Chilean cabernet might be Llama’s Liver, and an  Argentine malbec might be Tango Twist. I made those up, but the real ones are no better; they include a Spanish wine called Toro Loco – Crazy Bull – and a French rosé called Elle, in case you didn’t know pink wine is for women.best fonts for wine labels In other words, the broader range of sales channels for wines in Quebec isn’t what it might seem. buy white cloud wineI assume (and hope) that when supermarkets in Ontario start to sell wine, what they stock will be better than this.buy beer and wine online

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Try it with barbecued ribs, wings, and burgers. Everyone loves a parade — but on a frigid February night in Quebec City, as crowds stomp frozen feet in two feet of snow, some might love it just a little less. Quebec is one of the coldest cities in North America, with nighttime lows in the single digits in February. That's when the city's two-week “Carnaval de Quebec” draws Quebecers outdoors for dancing snowmen, diving acrobats and an improbable wintertime party. And that's where Caribou comes in — as in the Canadian version of reindeer, with a capital C. The furry-antlered animal is the namesake of Quebec's favorite wintertime outdoor party drink. When it's really cold outside, and it usually is, people here say Caribou is liquid sunshine. “It keeps you warm, so you can continue to watch the parade,” says Nadia Lo Russo, bundled up with a cup in a be-mittened hand. “That's why we drink it.” Caribou is a traditional alcoholic punch, sold only by Quebec's liquor board — up to 60,000 bottles a year, nearly all during the carnival season.

At carnival time, the streets and parks of the old city are lined with bars sculpted out of ice, where bartenders in parkas serve Caribou shooters from molded ice shot glasses. Some people bring their own, in hollow plastic canes topped with the head of Bonhomme, Quebec's official carnival snowman. “You unscrew his head, you pour the drink in, and you walk around on the street drinking the Caribou out of the cane,” explains tour guide Steeve Gaudreault. “Scientifically speaking, alcohol doesn't make you warm — it's actually the opposite — but it makes you feel warm.” Feeling warm in the cold is the holy grail here, and that may be why Caribou is a beloved cultural icon. This year, for the 60th winter carnival, organizers set up an official Caribou museum, a revival of La Voûte à 'Ti-Père, a 70s-era basement gathering spot for Caribou aficionados, in Quebec's historic old town. On a Saturday afternoon, folklorist and musician Jacques Dupuis entertains the crowds there with a fiddle-and-step show of traditional Quebecois music.

His first song celebrates romance's triumph, over Caribou. “Caribou m'endors, mais l'amour me reveille encore,” sings the crowd, “Caribou knocks me out, but love wakes me up again.” But the star attraction at the museum is the drink itself, served up traditionally steaming hot or cold in little plastic cups. Bartender Richard Le Blanc says, on weekends, he serves up to 800 shots a day. He warns repeat customers to take it slow — the sweet flavor masks a serious kick. “One is okay, two is perfect. Three — you're getting close to danger,” he says, with a laugh. “You're going to make the angel in the snow, and maybe you do things that you hope no one is going to take a picture on Facebook!” Caribou's name, further alluded to by a snowbound herd of caribou on the bottle's label, is not a coincidence. It's named for its resemblance to — many say its original recipe containing — caribou blood. “It used to be a mix of alcohol and caribou blood, very nutritious,” says Dupuis the fiddler, wiggling his eyebrows in gory glee.

“But they changed the recipe because some people were not very into blood.” A good story, says Gaudreault, who leads historical tours of the city, but too good to be true. He says the name stems from a simple misunderstanding: native people mistook the dark-colored fortified wine enjoyed by French trappers for caribou blood. “That's what it looked like,” he says. “The name kind of stayed and it became just a cultural thing to drink in the winter.” Whether there once was or there wasn't, the one thing everyone agrees on is there's no blood in Caribou today. So, what IS in it? The bottle is coy, listing only “wine, alcohol, natural flavors and sulfites,” adding up to a total of 22.9 percent alcohol. The back label boasts it's the beverage of choice at Quebec's snowshoeing competitions and maple-sugar parties. An informal poll around town turns up a whole liquor cabinet-worth of guesses. Alexandre Naud, an archeology student tending one of the carnival grounds' outdoor carved-ice bars, is sure it's a cocktail of whiskey and red wine.

“Port, sherry, vodka and brandy,” insists another temporary bartender, railway station manager Robert Verrault. New Yorker Bill McGuin, tasting his first Caribou, heard that it's a mix of red wine and vodka. In fact, the official recipe is a trade secret. “If I tell you, they have to kill me,” jokes Phil Tieman of Mondia Alliance, which produces the only commercially available version of Caribou. All he'll give away is a basic outline: wine, grain alcohol, and two “very specific” Quebec spices. But while the mystery bottle with the reindeer on it may be the only Caribou Quebecers can buy, there's no monopoly on the Caribou that Quebecers have been making at home for generations. “It's like the spaghetti recipe,” says bartender Richard Le Blanc. “You have the basic recipe and everyone adds what he likes. It can become anything, finally, as long as it's wine and alcohol.” So there are as many Caribous in Quebec as there are, well, caribou. “My personal recipe?” says Steeve Gaudreault, the historical tour guide: two-thirds of a bottle of a good, un-oaked merlot or bordeaux, one-third of a bottle of good brandy.