Every family has a tree. Ours has vines growing through it. The Schales line: eight generations of winemakers. The Franks: ten generations of grape growers. The two lines meet in a farmhouse in Summerland, British Columbia, which even we admit neither Christian Schales nor Hans Jacob Frank would have seen coming.
1st Generation The frank Family
The oldest name we can document. When Hans Jacob was born, Johann Sebastian Bach was six years old and the Okanagan was Syilx land no European had yet mapped. His descendants have been growing grapes ever since.
2nd Generation The frank Family
The eighteenth century brought new ideas and changing fortunes, but life in the vineyard followed an older rhythm. Spring, summer, harvest, winter. Year after year, the work continued. The vines did not care who ruled. They simply needed tending.
3rd Generation The frank Family
A quiet continuity through the eighteenth century, with the kind of steady, unglamorous grape growing that every wine region is secretly built on.
1st Generation The schales Family
Planted the first three acres of family vines in 1783, outside Dalsheim. Everything on this page, and in your glass, for that matter, starts with him.
4th Generation The frank Family
The French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars transformed the German lands. Through all of it, the vineyard remained. Wars came and went. Borders moved. The vines still needed tending.
2nd Generation The schales Family
Conscripted into Napoleon’s army as a young man. He survived the wars, came home, and stayed true to his own growth – the vines. The first Schales to learn that history happens to farmers, and farmers carry on anyway. Here is his letter from the 49th Regiment in Spain.
5th Generation The frank Family
The line holds through Napoleon’s wars and the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Different storms than both families weathered. The solution is always the same… tend the vines.
3rd Generation The schales Family
Under Philipp, wine stopped being one of the things the family did and became the only thing. Sole living, full commitment. Since then, there’s been no Plan B in this family. In the photo are Philipp’s grandparents on his mother’s side (the Zimmermann family).
4th Generation The schales Family
The experimenter. He brought the Muscat vine into the vineyard to grow alongside Riesling and Silvaner – proof that “traditional” has never meant “unchanging.” In the photo with him are his wife, Maria and son, Philipp III.
6th Generation The frank Family
Grew grapes through the era when phylloxera and modern science remade European viticulture from the roots up. Literally.
5th Generation The schales Family
The tested generation. His era of growers was ravaged by phylloxera, the root louse that destroyed vineyards across Europe. Philipp’s generation replanted, regrafted, and refused to quit. When we talk about fortitude, this is who we mean. In the photo, Philipp III with his wife, Barbara.
7th Generation The frank Family
The quality man. While his brother worked as a head sommelier in Paris and London—yes, the family had someone at the top of the wine trade’s front-of-house too—Heinrich focused the farm on growing better, not bigger.
6th Generation The schales Family
Formally trained in viticulture and oenology at Oppenheim, then turned exporter, shipping wine in barrels down the Rhine by barge, bound for England. The first Schales to prove the family’s wine could travel. Not the last.
8th Generation The frank Family
Delivered the family’s wine barrels to Stuttgart with a harnessed horse team. When your delivery vehicle eats hay, you learn patience and punctuality. In the photo, Adolf Frank with his wife, Emilie.
7th Generation The schales Family
Bernd’s father. Studied at Weinsberg, then, alongside his two younger brothers, expanded the family estate to a production of 53,000 cases. The winery he built still thrives in Flörsheim-Dalsheim, run today by Bernd’s cousins. In this photo, with his wife, Elisabeth.
9th Generation The frank Family
Stefanie’s father. Former President of the grape growers’ co-operative winery in his hometown – a 133,000-case operation. Before the family left for Canada, he gave Bernd and Stefanie the advice that still hangs over everything we do: “You can change a lot of things, but you cannot change nature.”
8th Generation The schales Family
Five years of viticulture, oenology and business at university. Cellars in Germany, New Zealand and South Africa. And then, in 2003, the boldest move in eight generations – a new continent, with his grandfather’s winepress in the shipping container. Winemaker and viticulturist of everything you’ll taste here.
10th Generation The frank Family
Tenth-generation grape grower, first generation Canadian. Trained in architectural design, which explains why the farm looks the way it does. Runs sales, the Lineage Club, distribution and the wine shop and still ends up in the vineyard rows more days than not.
9th Generation The schales Family
Johanna crossed the Atlantic as a baby. Her brother and sister are Okanagan-born. Whether any of them takes up the press is entirely their call – that’s another family rule. But the name over the door already believes in them.
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