(Wines&Vines) - When children in Canada sing the Woody Guthrie classic, “This land is your land,” it comes with a local twist that has the country stretching “from Bonavista to Vancouver Island.”

Those lyrics are now on the verge of coming true for Canada’s wine industry, as Carl Sparkes of Devonian Coast Wineries Ltd. prepares to apply this week for a license to launch Newfoundland’s first grape winery that will use fruit grown on the slopes above Bonavista Bay on Canada’s northeast coast.

The hardscrabble soils of Newfoundland with its iceberg-speckled ocean waters are a far cry from the Rutherford dust of the Napa Valley, but Sparkes told Wines & Vines this week that hardy white varieties such as L’Acadie Blanc (the signature grape of Nova Scotia, where he owns Jost Vineyards and Gaspereau Vineyards), Seyval Blanc and Riesling are showing promise.

“Our properties are in the right locations, it seems. The vines have wintered well,” Sparkes said. “Our classic Nova Scotia grape, the L’Acadie, is just loving the climate, and we’ll be getting our first harvest this year from one block, and (it’s) looking very, very strong.”

Sparkes and his wife Donna launched Devonian Coast in 2011 and the following year acquired interests in pioneering Nova Scotia winery Jost Vineyards as well as fledgling producer Gaspereau Vineyards (see “Nova Scotia Winery Gains Investor.”)

Sparkes has now turned his attention to his native province of Newfoundland, where vineyards have been planted at the head of Bonavista Bay, where shallow waters and glacial soils on a series of drumlins promise the right mix of conditions for white wine grapes.

“We’re talking about glacial tills about 20 feet deep,” Sparkes said. “It’s fantastic property, but then we have the actual moderating effect of the shallow water that dips into Bonavista Bay. The water temperature is considerably warmer as you come to the inner sides where the drumlins jut into the ocean.”