I can take that.
The barriers are pretty simple. For the most part, we're dealing with a singular retailer in each province. They have very significant markup structures. There's no markup relief for Canadian wines that are not produced within the home province of those liquor boards. We don't have margin relief. We're on the same competitive footing as European wines, when we sell to the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission. So that's part one and that is making it cost prohibitive for a lot of people to even consider that marketplace.
Second was the issue of the cost of putting on a promotion. This is where we think Growing Forward 2 can actually be helpful in helping support initiatives around Canadian wine. The SAQ is probably the biggest retailer of wine on the planet, and 100% of Canadian wines are less than .5% of wine sales in that market because it is so cost prohibitive for our domestic wine industry to retail in that market.
Money talks when it comes to those retailers and both industry associations like mine and wineries on their own simply aren't resourced to take that on. Where we have been able to do promotions, like the ones we support in Manitoba, it has led to increased listings, bigger support in the marketplace, and all those things.
The other thing that is probably scaring off some of our wineries is this issue of labelling and signage in stores because for a 100% VQA product that we make in Ontario to be shelved in some liquor boards under a sign that says “Canada with blended wines”, which are sometimes half the price, that is giving the consumer the wrong impression of the price value of our products. For a lot of markets like that, our wineries bottom line is that unless we can be shelved as 100% Canadian, we're not even going to make the effort in the marketplace.