by Doug Sloan
Early Winemaking in British Columbia
Wine has been being made in British Columbia for over a century. The B.C. wine industry, however, dates back formally only to the period after WW1 in the 1920s.
Some visionary credit for the development of the wine industry in BC should go to Father Charles John Felix Adolf Marie Pandosy, if only to embellish the charm of the myth that has him founding B.C.'s wine industry in the Okanagan Valley . Pandosy arrived in the Okanagan with a group of Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1859.
Writing to his Oblate superiors, Pandosy described the mission site, east of what is now Kelowna: “It is a great valley situated on the left bank of the great Lake Okanagan… …and I myself believe that if Father Blanchet is able to send us, next year, some vine cuttings, we shall be able to start a plantation.”
In the Okanagan, as in California , Mexico and throughout South America , sacramental wine flowed deeply in the footsteps of questing Catholic Missionaries in search of souls to save.
Although there is no record of Father Pandosy ever selling wine, Mission Hill wines named its early “Pandosy Cellars” wines in his memory, helping seal the good Father's romantically historical (but erroneous) role as the founder of the wine industry in B.C.
Built on Loganberries: The Birth of B.C.'s Wine Industry
The City of Victoria was founded by the Hudson 's Bay Company on March 14, 18 43, as a trading post and fort. Although it is seldom acknowledged, there were already plantings of grape vines on Salt Spring Island , at that time. The gnarly ancient vines can still be found in scattered abandoned farm sites on Salt Spring.
Salt Spring was the breadbasket that grew food for the growing community of 425 souls just an hour away, by rowboat, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island . The Catholic Church was just as evident on Salt Spring, then, as it was in the Okanagan six years later when Father Pandosy arrived. Men made wine for sacramental use.
With the discovery of gold on the British Columbia mainland in 1858, Victoria became the port, supply base, and outfitting center for miners on their way to the Cariboo Gold Fields. With all that gold (…and good and bad fortune!) riding the wave of the Gold Rush, it is difficult to believe that some surplus wine did not find willing buyers.
Started in 1921, Growers' Wines was opened in Victoria in 1923 by farmers who were growing loganberries on the Saanich Pensinsula. At first it produced sweet port-styled wines: “Logana” made solely from loganberries and “Vin Supreme” from a blend of loganberries and blueberries. Later its leading brands included “Slinger” wines, named for jockey-turned-winemaker Stephen Slinger and popular with British Columbians for the next 50 years.
Making wine from fruit, rather than grapes, is a recurring theme in the history of B.C. winemaking. It cropped up again in the 1930's as the industry built itself. It will continue to be an aspect of B.C. winemaking throughout the industry's history and is still a force in British Columbia 's wine scene today.
B.C.'s First Professional Grape Growers & Winemakers 
In 1926, almost 70 years after Father Pandosy recognized the potential, Jesse Willard Hughes, an agricultural entrepreneur from Iowa , was planting grapes at Pioneer Vineyards - east of Kelowna .
The credit for contracting Hughes first grapes for winemaking generally goes to Growers' Wines. In fact, those first $100/ton wine grape contracts were signed with Victoria Wineries (B.C.) Ltd. By the time of Hughes' first grape shipment from the Okanagan to the winery in Victoria , in 1930, it had been acquired by Growers' Wines Ltd.
Around the same time Guiseppe Ghezzi was busily organizing a syndicate of farmers and investors – largely of Italian immigrant origin – that eventually included Peter Casorso, Pasquale (Cap) Capozzi and W.A.C.Bennett. They opened Domestic Wines and By-Products Co. in 1932 to take advantage of the great glut of apples in the Okanagan during the Great Depression.
“The company's original apple wines – Okay Red, Okay Clear, Okay Port and Okay Champagne – were a bitter disappointment,” according to the company's own historians. “Many bottles re-fermented on liquor store shelves and had to be thrown out.”
By 1935, grapes had begun to find their way into the wines and Calona Wines Ltd. was the syndicate's new name. Sales languished until the establishment of a military base in Vernon brought an influx of money to the Okanagan thanks to World War II.
J.W.Hughes continued to expand his vineyards by acquiring and planting 235 acres at Okanagan Mission in 1937. Through the late 1940's he passed his properties on to H.D.Powell, Martin Dulik and Frank Schmidt. Many of these families are still closely associated with B.C. winemaking as growers and winemakers.
The Growth Of An Industry:
From Domestic Wines and By-Products Co. To Vincor International
Guiseppe Ghezzi's son Carlo Ghezzi turned over the management of Calona Wines Ltd. to Cap Capozzi and his sons Herb, Joe and Tom in 1960. The Capozzis modelled Calona Wines on California 's giant Gallo Wines and they marketed their products aggressively in B.C. and throughout Canada . Bright packaging innovations and celebrity associations helped drive Calona's growth.
Herb Capozzi had a successful career as a tackle with the Montreal Allouettes and the Calgary Stampeders before getting into the family business. He was a much sought after banquet speaker and usually insisted that Calona wines be served at these functions.
Casabello (who, in 1974, pioneered the bottle that doubled as a decanter - once emptied - in B.C) and Mission Hill wines both opened in 1967. By that time Calona Wines had overtaken Growers' Wines as the industry leader in sales and Calona spent close to $1,000,000 on what Capozzi Sr. called “the most modern and up-to-date winery in all of Canada”. Things were warming up in the B.C. wine industry!
Ontario 's Jordan Wines Ltd. bought Victoria 's Growers' Wines in 1973 and merged it with their B.C. subsidiary Villa Wines, taking the name Jordan & Ste-Michelle Cellars Ltd in 1976, when they relocated the winery to Surrey .
Another Ontario giant, T.G.Brights & Co, acquired Jordan & Ste-Michelle in the 1980s, merging it with Cartier (formerly Casabello Wines) & Innsikillin Cellars in the mid-1990s. This conglomerate consolidated their operations in Bright's Oliver winery and ultimately became the B.C. division of Vincor International.
Trials & Tribulations In The Vineyards: The Becker Project
While the series of start-ups, mergers and acquisitions that shaped the B.C. wine industry were taking place in Okanagan vineyards, smoky back rooms and corporate boardrooms, the industry was evolving by-the-bootstraps from the vineyard up to aspire to noble heights in the world wine scene.
From a base of loganberries, spurred on by Calona's failed attempt to turn apples into wine, the grapes that fuelled the B.C. wine industry by 1975 were almost exclusively hybrids. Hughes' original 1926 plantings were primarily labrusca varieties, native to North America , adequate for sweet fortified and sparkling wines but “too musky and grapey” to make high quality, world-class dry table wines.
Years ahead of their time, in 1930, Eugene and Virgil Rittich, two Hungarian brothers, planted classic European vinfera varieties near Kelowna . Eugene Rittich was winemaker for Growers Wines' from 1935 to 1957 and, as John Shreiner muses in “The Wineries of British Columbia”(1994), the brothers presumably supplied that winery with grapes.
It's interesting to think that chardonnay, chasselas, sylvaner, muller-thurgau and perle of csaba – as well as red blauburgunder – were likely components of those early Growers' wines in the 1930's. Having to bury the vinifera vines every winter to avoid killing frosts may, however, have dissuaded other grape growers from following their lead, then.
During the “Pop!” wine expansion of the Okanagan vineyards in the 1960s government agriculturists recommended red vinifera/labrusca hybrids like de chaunac and marechal foch and the ubiquitous local white labrusca - Okanagan riesling. Winter-hardy and dependably productive, this kind of less-than-absolutely-perfect combination of vines was, at that time, the basis of B.C.'s mostly sweet and sparkling winemaking industry.
Experimental vinifera plantings in the ‘50s and ‘60's were decimated in the bitter winter of 1968-69. Despite that setback, in 1974 the provincial government imported 4000 assorted vinifera vines from Washington and California . Gewurztraminer, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and merlot were spread through eighteen sites in the Okanagan. They were almost all killed in the hard frost of the winter of 1978-79.
In 1976, Dr. Helmut Becker of Germany 's famed Geisenheim Wine Institute toured the Okanagan Valley , invited by his student Walter Gehringer, then assistant winemaker at Andrés Wines. Intrigued by the potential of the valley, Becker supplied 27 different classic European vinifera varieties for trials that ran from 1977 to 1985.
In what came to be known as the “Becker Project”, pinot blanc, auxerrois, schonburger, scheurebe, ehrenfelser, muller-thurgau and riesling emerged as the base vinifera varietals for the maturing winemaking industry in the Okanagan.
Trial and error proved to growers that many of the winter-kill problems (and thin, acidic wines) were largely the result of overcropping – expecting the vines to consistently produce a maximum number of grapes, between 5 and 10 tons per acre.
Bunch-thinning and vine management reduced the size of the crops but proved crucial in maintaining the health, vigour and survival of the delicate and “noble” vinifera vines.
More recently, a trend towards warmer winter temperatures – global warming? - has combined with good viticultural practices to enhance the survival rate of vinifera plantings. Carefully chosen sites and scrupulous vineyard management have prevailed.
Building The Industry: The “Pop!” Wine Boom
The Grape Growers Association was established in 1961 by provincial government decree, not quite coincidentally, just in time to participate in the “Pop!” wine boom.
British Columbia consumers, through the 1960's up until 1978, were discovering and enjoying “Pop!” wines. This phenomenon was driven by the U.S. wine industry's successful campaign to woo U.S. soft drink and beer drinkers with low alcohol carbonated wines that made a popping sound when opened.
There is an old European tradition of combining the remnants of all the wines at a party in a single bowl, at the end of an evening, and calling it the “cold end”. The German word for end is ende . German for duck is ente . In the U.S. Cold Duck was devised as a low alcohol sparkling wine that not only attracted soft drink and beer drinking consumers but – at only 7% alcohol/volume – it also attracted less tax.
Andrés Wines introduced their version of Cold Duck in Canada in the mid-1960s. They followed that with similar sweet red and white wines called Chanté. In 1971 they created Baby Duck – a soft-drink-sweet blend of red and white Chanté wines. 
Hugely successful, Baby Duck was the best-selling domestic wine during the 1970s and it hatched numerous imitators: Canada Duck, Love-A-Duck, Kool Duck, Daddy Duck and Fuddle Duck were joined by Cold Turkey, etc… All of these wines driving the runaway expansion in the wine trade in the 1960s and 1970s were concocted from water, sugar and grapes that were judged unsuitable for making good quality dry table wines.
Baby Duck was originally made from “musky” native labrusca varieties such as concord and bath - and Andrés simply couldn't get enough of them. As well as encouraging local grape growers to plant more of these high-yielding and hardy varieties, B.C. wineries were obliged to import grapes and inexpensive finished wines from California.
It was in this climate of accelerating demand and unquenchable growth that the Grape Growers Marketing Board was formed, in 1970, to negotiate grape purchasing contracts with B.C.'s major wineries and ensure that all of the B.C. wine grape crop found buyers, when imported grapes might be cheaper. The Marketing Board's negotiating influence effectively eliminated growers' individual accountability for the quality of their grapes.
At the tail of the “Pop!” wine boom, in 1978, the L.D.B. had doubled its listings to 1470 different products, more than twice what they had ten years earlier. Curious consumers were trying imported, dry, classic red and white wines from Europe and liking them.
The attempts of big wineries to make classic wines with labrusca or hybrid grapes were seldom satisfactory. But Growers had no incentive to plant fragile and lower-yeilding vinifera vines. Something needed to be done to drag B.C. winemaking into a brighter future. Of all the major wineries, only Mission Hill embraced the proposed changes.
Veering Towards Vitis Vinifera
In his introduction to the 1994 edition of “The Wineries of British Columbia” John Schreiner refers to “the Okanagan's first great pullout program” in 1979, when “650 acres of labrusca grapes were uprooted”. Replacing these “musky”, overly “grapey” but hardy and dependable - varieties of native North American vitis labrusca vines with classic European vitis vinifera vines was no easy task..
Despite the Rittich brothers early attempts in the 1930s and the ongoing Becker Project trials from 1977-85, the disastrously cold snap that marked the vine-killing winter of 1968-1969 lingered in many growers' memories.
Although early experimental vinifera plantings through the 1960s and 1970s (and the Becker Project trials) were well underway in the Okanagan, the need to plant hardy, dependable vines was reinforced by another devastating vine kill due to the deep freeze of the winter of 1978-79.
Many growers lost their vines to these frosts. The Becker Project proved vitis vinifera could survive and even thrive in British Columbia when properly handled. Avoiding overcropping by deliberate bunch-thinning, paying attention to soil, vineyard elevation and orientation, learning and applying viticultural techniques such as trellising and canopy management to ensure ripe fruit - all of these were crucial for vinifera survival.
In the process of learning these lessons many reluctant grape growers, who had become accustomed to being paid by the weight on their crops rather than the quality, had to be convinced to change their perspective.
The provincial government introduced “cottage winery” guidelines in 1978, in a speech given by Tourism Minister Grace McCarthy in Kelowna , offering opportunities for grape growers to become winemakers overnight. If they could come up with 20 acres of vineyard, they were entitled to a license to make and sell up to 30,000 gallons of wine.
One of the few stipulations was that estate wineries could not extract more than 150 gallons of juice from a ton of grapes, intended to prevent them from adding water and sugar to wines. This practice was legal in commercial wineries at the time.
After almost 50 years of strict regulation, control of the direction that the wine industry in British Columbia would take began to shift from a handful of large companies to vineyard-owning families, small groups of investors and grape-growing entrepreneurs.
What soon became Claremont Estate Winery was first off the mark – established by grower Marrion Jon in 1979 as Chateau Jonn de Trepanier; Vinitera opened that same year. Uniacke Estate Winery, Cedar Creek and Sumac Ridge were granted licenses in 1980. Gray Monk came along in 1982 and Divino Estate Winery followed in 1983. Gehringer Brothers and LeComte debuted in 1986. Hainle Vineyards opened in 1988.
The Great Grape Pullout: The Canada – U.S. Free Trade Agreement 1988
In 1988, the Canada – U.S. Free Trade Agreement (in conjunction with a GATT ruling against protective barriers that favoured domestic wineries) provoked the federal, Ontario and British Columbia governments into funding a massive "pullout" of labrusca vines, giving wineries funding to replace them with vinifera ones. Growers received $8100 an acre to pull out the vines.
Approximately 2,400 acres of labrusca were pulled, reducing the B.C. wine industry to about 1,000 acres of primarily vinifera varieties. Despite initial pessimism among existing growers, new vineyards planted with mostly “noble” varieties went into the ground at an accelerating rate, with fresh new faces coming into the renewed industry as fast as new estate wineries were licensed and built.
Farmgate wineries came on the scene in 1989 when the provincial government relaxed the licensing rules to include vineyards of less than 20 acres. Lang Vineyards – the first farmgate winery (named because the entire production must be sold directly from the farm “gate”) - was joined by Wild Goose, Hillside Cellars and Nichol Vineyard.
Wine quality soared as new vinifera plantings matured and riper, “classic” wines were fashioned from the resulting grapes. The formation of the British Columbia Wine Institute in 1991 marked a milestone. With fine wines available, Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) standards were enacted and monitored by the B.C.W.I. They ensured that all VQA approved wines were 85% of the named variety and 95% from the named vintage, as well as being quality approved by an industry panel in blind tastings.
By 1994, vineyard acreage had rebounded to 1,600. The bloom of new vineyards and estate and farmgate wineries continued. In 2004 there were 6,000 acres under vine in B.C. – most of it in the Okanagan Valley but also elsewhere throughout B.C.
There are now, in 2005, vineyards and wineries in the Similkameen Valley, The Fraser Valley, the Cowichan Valley and up and down Vancouver Island, including the Gulf Islands of Saturna, Salt Spring and Quadra. Vineyard plantings and new wineries are ongoing wherever wine grapes can be grown on the mainland and the Islands .
Begun on a base of fruit wines made from loganberries and blueberries in the 1920s, the B.C. wine industry has come full circle with mouthwatering fruit wines being produced today by Elephant Island Winery in Naramata, Blossom Winery and The Fort Winery in the Fraser Valley, Marley Farm Winery in Saanichton on Vancouver Island, Godfrey-Brownell Vineyards in Duncan and Marshwood Estate Winery on Quadra Island.
In 1984 there were 13 wineries in B.C. In 2005 there are 126. New sites for vineyards are created or discovered daily and fresh new people with new ideas turn them into working vineyards and wineries. There will be many more.
The Role of the LDB in the Development of the BC Wine Industry
Between October 1917 and June 1921, the Prohibition Act banned the sale of all intoxicating beverages in British Columbia with the exception of products sold for medicinal, sacramental or manufacturing purposes. As alcohol could still be sold by prescription, the government opened liquor stores in Vancouver , Victoria , Nanaimo , Prince Rupert , Quesnel, Cranbrook and New Denver.
Most of the “medicine” sold through 315,177 prescriptions (in 1919) was rye whiskey. But these government stores also sold 1,362 gallons of port, 445 gallons of sherry, 35 cases of champagne and 47 cases of St.Augustine sacramental wine that year.
Although they had approved the Prohibition Act, it became apparent that most British Columbians wanted controlled liquor sales rather than a complete ban. Today's B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch (LDB) can trace its roots back to government liquor stores opened in 1921 under the Moderation Act - after the Prohibition Act was repealed.
Stores built in the 1930s and 1940s had curtains installed on the windows to prevent children from seeing into the stores. In the 1950s and 1960s, stores were built with glass bricks instead of windows - they admitted light but kept children from seeing inside.
The BCLDB was created in 1975 to separate the retail functions of the Liquor Control Board from licensing duties. From new headquarters in Vancouver , the LDB opened new stores, explored overseas and increased product selection in B.C. Between 1968 and 1978 the portfolio doubled from 700 listings to 1470. In December 1980 when the LDB opened its flagship store at 39 th and Cambie in Vancouver , the store's 1,962 listings included 1,271 wines, most of which were table wines.
B.C. commercial wineries grew with the new LDB through the 1970s, creating new products to fill consumer demand and rising expectations. New imported products from Europe and the U.S. fuelled demand for B.C. equivalents.
Begun in 1978, the annual Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival helped create a market that B.C. wineries and the LDB conspired to fill. Expo 86 allowed our new estate wineries to showcase their products on the world stage. British Columbians also sat up and took note. The LDB helped consumers gain access by listing them.
Since its inception in 1991, the B.C.Wine Institute has worked closely with the LDB to increase VQA listings and provide training and co-development of VQA advocates. These are in-store champions and on-site trainers with specialized knowledge of premium VQA wines.
Doug Sloan writes WineWise which appears weekly in the North Islander weekend newspaper in Campbell River, B.C. Doug's website
WineWise at: http://www.geocities.com/douglas_sloan/
Also see :
London WInery
Vincor International
HIstory of Icewine
