Summerland, BC | Overcast, 19°C
8th Generation Vineyard
Our ancestors taught us that, and 243 years of vintages haven’t found an exception. So the real winemaking here happens outdoors: pruning, tucking, and thinning. Walking the rows and, at harvest, picking every single grape by hand. All of it is processed right here on the home farm, most of it our estate fruit, the rest from three BC growers we know by first name.
The modern wine industry sells a whole catalogue of treatment products, and we consciously leave nearly all of it on the shelf. Our approach is the one the family has refined since 1783: press the grapes gently, let the pre-clarified juice ferment, and stay out of the wine’s way. Clean and precise, as it has been done for millennia. Some of our wines are vegan. We’re not certified organic, but we follow organic practices wherever we can—ask us about it at the tasting bar and settle in.
Steam cleaning barrels prior to filling
Going home after a long day
Barrels are ready for filling
Tank cooling jacket maintenance
Wine press
In 2009 we became the first winery in Canada to produce frizzante-style wines—the gently sparkling style Italy has always loved. There was no equipment for it in the country, so we imported ours from Germany. No second fermentation, no yeast aging, no Champagne theatre. Base wines rest a minimum of three months in a pressure tank while CO2 slowly weaves itself into the wine. The result is soft, tiny bubbles and fruit that tastes vividly, joyfully young. Seventeen years on, our Confidence and Integrity frizzantes are still the reason many people first find us.
This is Frizzante Integrity
It means the year the frost took our grape harvest, we made cider from our own apples rather than trucking in juice from outside British Columbia. It means selling a vineyard when the honest choice was to farm less land better. It means two people doing every step from cultivation to bottling because that’s the only quality control we fully trust. Small isn’t our limitation. It’s our specification.
See the wines it makes and watch it happen in person: book a tasting.