McWatters: When I started in the business, we only had two consumers: those that took it out of the brown paper bags and those that didn’t. One thing that is the most constant in the wine industry – I have 38 vintages behind me in the business – is that we are market-driven. It is the wineries that listen to what the customers want that will be amongst the most successful.

Baby Duck
You must know that there were a handful of consumers that really wanted a product like Baby Duck, and a lot of other wines like it. [Baby Duck, a pink sparkling wine with seven per cent alcohol, was created in 1971 in British Columbia by Andrés Wines Ltd.]

As much as people chuckle about it today, it is evident that that style of wine introduced an awful lot of folks to the idea of drinking wine. People who grew up in Canada drank soft drinks in their youth -- sweet cold bubbly beverages. So a transitional step from drinking that to something that might be actually be made of grapes, the Baby Duck style of wines, was a pretty natural progression. It was sweet, cold and bubbly – and sometimes had grapes in it. As much as nobody admitted to drinking it, it was the largest selling alcoholic beverage in this country for five consecutive years.

I shouldn’t pick on Baby Duck because it is an easy target. There were lots of other products like it that were sweet, cold and bubbly and were named after ducks or bears or geese. I usually call that the zoology stage of the wine industry in Canada.

From there, it was pretty easy to progress to still wines that were fruity, that were served cold, tended to be lighter in alcohol. A lot of them tended to be German imitators. A lot of those are still in the market and become great introductions to the idea of drinking wine.

To go from there to the next step, to wines that were not necessarily German imitators but were either German wines or wines that were produced in British Columbia from Germanic styles of grapes was a pretty easy transition. We really built the first credible industry for British Columbia grown wines based on that Germanic characteristic.

Becker Project
The Becker Project was influenced not only from the market but from the production side. Two major plantings in the Okanagan were planted [under the direction of] Dr. Helmut Becker of the Geisenheim Institute. He planted just a plethora of different grape varieties to see how they would do here. It was a great experiment for him and it was a great experiment for us. [The so-called Becker Project ran from 1977 to 1985 and evaluated a large number of vinifera varieties, many of which were then picked up by growers.]

We are still trying to overcome some of the varieties that were grown. It wasn’t that they were not good. But we are often asked in other regions of the world why we grow such a wide, wide range of varieties. We have things like Optima, Ortega, Bacchus, Oraniensteiner, Rkatsitelli, Matsvani, Ehrenfelser … and the list just goes on. All of them make some wonderful wines. It is not where we have evolved to.

But they were great stepping stones for two reasons. One, they embraced the palate of the consumer of the day. And two, they proved to us and the world that we could actually grow and mature Vitis vinifera vines. This really puzzles people in other parts of the world: how do we do what we do?

Frequently, I will be in the winery, talking to Vancouver and being asked what all the rain is doing to the grapes. And I will look out the window and ask, “What rain?”

Okanagan Valley
Ninety-five per cent of British Columbia’s grapes are grown in the Okanagan Valley. It is more than 100 miles from the U.S. border to the northern extremity. There are several mountain ranges in British Columbia and the Okanagan sits in the middle of the province. The south Okanagan is 400 miles due east of Vancouver. [The mountain ranges block the Pacific rains from reaching the Okanagan.]

At our Black Sage vineyard, where some of our wines come from, the average rainfall over the last 30 years is six inches a year. In some years, we fall dramatically below that. We can’t grow grapes in the Okanagan Valley without irrigation. That’s one fact.

Another thing that surprises people is that we get more hours of sunlight than any other region – not any other grape-growing region but any other place – in North America. When you go to Hawaii, it gets dark about six o’clock. On the 21st of June, we don’t get dark until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. So we only get three or four hours of total darkness. And the nice thing about getting a lot of sunlight is that it happens during the growing season!

The other factor is that we get greater light intensity. This is not a McWatters theory but one pointed out by Dr. Richard Smart, an internationally renowned viticulturist who measures light intensity in vineyards around the world. He says we get more light intensity than any other grape growing region in the world.

With this lack of rainfall, the abundance of sunshine and the light intensity, we should be able to grow everything. And we try.

Light intensity
Question: Can you clarify light intensity?

McWatters: It is a measurement of the intensity with which the sunlight hits the surface of the leaf.

Question: Does our geographical position [in the northern hemisphere] contribute to it?

McWatters: Yes. Obviously, the profile of the vineyard is going to assist that. But if you have air pollution and cloud cover, the sun won’t get there to start with. Lack of air pollution is a big part of the Okanagan advantage.

More than what light intensity is, what does it do? It generates photosynthesis and that develops the plants. We are not actually in the business of growing grape vines, we are in the business of growing grapes. So the importance of light intensity is what it does to the fruit that is on that vine.

I believe that this is what is contributing to the complexity and the layers of flavour that we are able to develop. Not by itself, of course, but it is a major contributing factor.

Quality also comes down to clonal selection, site selection, the variety itself, rootstocks, and a multiple of other things that will add to getting us to maturity of the grape.

[The geographic position] of our region gives us ripeness in most varieties in most years, as long as good site selection has been a major consideration. Along with that ripeness, we still maintain abundant natural acidity. Sometimes, we get pretty assertive acids in some varieties in some locations in some years; so it is a matter sometimes of taming that.

Having said that, it also is what makes our wines a little more approachable with food than so many other regions. It helps develop the personality of the region.

Question: Can you give more detail on the extent of the Okanagan Valley?

McWatters: The appellation itself is defined by the watershed, which is basically from the peaks of the mountain ranges on either side; and from the U.S. border to just north of Vernon, the north end of the Okanagan watershed.

If you take the lake itself, the lake is 87 miles long – it does not cover our total region – and it is five miles wide at the widest point. The lake only goes as far south as Penticton. You really have a chain of lakes south of Penticton: Skaha Lake, Vaseux Lake, a number of small lakes, and then Osoyoos Lake, which crosses the border.

Without the lakes, we wouldn’t be growing grapes. We get really hot in the summer, but we could absolutely fry and not be able to sustain vineyards if it were not for the cooling effect we get in the summer [from the lakes]. And we cool off pretty dramatically at night because we are the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert.

Going from north to south, our soil conditions in the Okanagan change radically – even within small vineyard sites.

There is a big rock bluff, McIntyre Bluff, north of Oliver and at the south end of Vaseux Lake. That is where the glacier stopped during the ice age. So everything north of that is all glacial deposit. The lakes were formed by the glacier. As they subsided, they formed the benches where our grapes are grown.

Everything south of McIntyre Bluff is glacial flow. You will find lighter soils with boulders in them north of Oliver. But as you go south, it is tough to find rocks. Our Black Sage Vineyard [about seven miles south of Oliver] and the Black Sage Bench – the area is respected for having won the most awards for wines in the country over this last 10 years – is described as being sandy loam. Those of us who grow grapes there refer to it as the beach. That far south and on the east side of the valley, the soil is very light. In our Black Sage Vineyard, we have a minimum of 300 feet of sand. That changes how you grow grapes a little bit, compared to other sites.

Varietal proliferation
The challenge we have is that we have an industry that has been growing rapidly. When we signed the free trade agreement [1988], there were 14 wineries in the province. Today, we have over 100 wineries making wine in this province.

There is huge growth in the number of people [in the industry]. We have a lot of very small operations. Some have a two-acre block of land and they want to grow four varieties! And the fact that they may be north of Vernon is not necessarily going to deter them from putting in varieties that are a challenge to grow in the south end of the valley.

So what happens is that you get the same variety grown in radically different conditions in different parts of the valley. You are going to get different styles [of wine] just from where the vineyard is located.

Let’s talk about Gewürztraminer. It is an early variety. If you can’t mature Gewürztraminer, you probably should not being growing grapes on that site. We have lots of sites that are way too hot, where you also should not being growing Gewürztraminer. But people are also taking sites ideally suited to Gewürztraminer and trying to grow Bordeaux or even Rhone varieties, and ending up with less than ripe conditions.

They will sort that out one way or another. Sometimes, it is a slow process, but I don’t think we should have an organization that dictates what varieties should be grown in any particular area. If that had happened, we would still be growing hybrids in the Okanagan Valley, because the government told us many years ago that vinifera won’t survive.

Question: In the mid-1980s, when BC wines started to move, they were almost totally white. In fact, if you looked for a red, all that was available was Chancellor [a French hybrid variety].

McWatters: What’s wrong with Chancellor? Sumac Ridge made the first Chancellor in Canada and it was our work horse. We made it right up to 1995. Through the 1980s, it was probably regarded as the best red wine grown in Canada. We never grew it, by the way. I have three Chancellor plants and that is all I ever owned. [Sumac Ridge purchased Chancellor grapes, and stopped doing so when the vinifera vines on Black Sage Road started producing obviously superior fruit.]

Purist about vinifera
Question: Did you ever grow hybrids?

McWatters: We never planted a hybrid at Sumac Ridge or for Sumac Ridge. But through the 1980s, our bread and butter varietals were Okanagan Riesling, Verdelet and Chancellor. We were the first producer of Chancellor in the country and the second [after Andrés] of Verdelet.

The day the free trade agreement came down, we stopped making Okanagan Riesling – and that was a 10,000 case brand. I used the same CSPC number and submitted a package change, and called it Okanagan Blanc. It did not have any Okanagan Riesling in it but at least, it kept some of the momentum. We made Verdelet until 1993.

We did not make vinifera in our first vintage but we did in our second. In 1981, we made Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Gewürztraminer. We made our first Pinot Noir in, I think, 1985. We were only growing vinifera and we knew that that is where the future was. But we always thought that, if we get a cold winter, the hybrids will stand up.

A number of things contributed to the overwhelming number of white vinifera varieties [planted in the Okanagan in the 1980s]. First of all, we did not have access to the European plant material that we have today. When the free trade agreement was signed in 1988, we negotiated to get the border open, and for Canada to accept the French screening system for viruses on plants coming into the country. The first planting of French vines began in 1989. Dick Cleave, our vineyard manager, brought those in.

Question: Do you mean you could not bring in the cuttings before then?

McWatters: You could bring in cuttings by obtaining a phytosanitary certificate from the federal Department of Agriculture. At Sumac Ridge, we planted only vinifera even in the early 1980s: Chardonnay, a little bit of Pinot Noir, but mostly Gewürztraminer and Riesling. We went to Washington state and did all our own cuttings. They were all own-rooted. It worked for us but I would not do that again. We didn’t have access to the French vines.

Back in the early to mid-80s, we did get from Germany a number of varieties that are growing very well today, particularly the Riesling clone 21B. It is a phenomenal Riesling.

And also Pinot Blanc. Our early plantings of Pinot Blanc that we are using today go back to 1984, 1985. So we were getting vinifera vines, but they were not commonplace. A lot of the plants then came from cuttings from the Becker Project, or from cuttings from other areas; and we were developing own-rooted plants.

We did have a permit to bring the plants in. All our plants had been taken out and washed and out into insulation so that the inspectors at the border could take them out and see that they were clean. We were quarantined with them in the vineyard for three years.

We could not take any cuttings from the vineyard and propagate them elsewhere, in case we had brought a virus in. (We are going to die of plant protection before we ever die of viruses!) It was an interesting exercise, but it was what we had to do in those days to get vinifera.

Question: Are those plants still producing?

McWatters: Yes, they are. They are starting to get to an age now where they are not producing the same level of crop that they did. Over the next four, five years, we will replace them all. With grafted rootstock, we can shorten the growing season. We can develop better character and a more efficient crop.

Steller’s Jay
Why don’t we talk about the style of wine? I selected several wines.

Start with our 2001 Steller’s Jay Brut. We pioneered bottle-fermented sparkling wines in Canada. Our first major experimental lot was in 1985. We took 30 different grape varieties and we made six bottles of each wine, and we used six different yeasts. Thus, we ended up with 36 bottles of 30 different varieties.

In 1987, we set on a style or a cuvée. At that time it was, in descending order, Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Our first Steller’s Jay was two years on the lees before it was released in 1987. That year, British Columbia chose its official bird – the Steller’s Jay. That is the significance of the name of the wine.

We have continually stuck to those three varieties in Steller’s Jay. We have changed the cuvée somewhat. We were then and are now market-driven. Consumer tastes have changed. In 1987, we were 70% Pinot Blanc, 20% Chardonnay and 10% Pinot Noir.

All of them bring a number of things to the cuvée. But if we take what they bring most, Pinot Blanc delivers the fruit – honey dew melon characters and crisp apple and pear. Whenever you taste Steller’s Jay, for the most part, people would see that style of fruit, if not predominant, at least evident. Pinot Noir delivers a lot of the structure, a lot of the aromatics. You will get a little bit of sour cherry coming through. It’s the structure that we build around. The Chardonnay adds to the finesse. If you take Chardonnay by itself, you get a sparkling wine that has lots of finesse but not a lot of depth of character and it is not overly fruity. So we evolved things because the consumer has changed radically over time. We have taken down the fruit character by reducing the amount of Pinot Blanc and increasing the Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir. We also have extended the time on the yeast. The wine now is a minimum of 36 months on the yeast before we start to do any riddling.

Question: What is the cuvée on the 2001 Steller’s Jay?

McWatters: I am going to tell you that it is 40% Pinot Blanc, 40% Chardonnay and 20% Pinot Noir. Having said that, I know that one is 39% and one is 41% and I can never remember which.

The wine has continued to develop a great following. We have been very committed to sparkling wine, going back to the 1980s, partly because I love sparkling wine. This is the wine I drink while I decide which wine I am going to drink. There are not very many days when I don’t drink sparkling wine.

Our head winemaker is Mark Wendenburg and he has been with me since 1993. Part of the reason we had hired him is that he had worked on our sparkling wine project and his passion for sparkling wine was really evident when we were going through the interview process. He does a wonderful job on the entire portfolio. He has done a remarkable job for us.

We made 6,000 cases of 2001 Steller’s Jay and we are continuing to grow it. The 2002 vintage is closer to 6,500 cases.

Gewürztraminer
Our Gewürztraminer Private Reserve is the wine that most people associate with Sumac Ridge. We have been producing Gewürztraminer since 1981. We produce 13,500 cases now. Our cumulative awards over the vintages makes this the most awarded wine ever produced in the country. It is very consistent from year to year. There are vintage variations but they are not huge. It is the earliest variety we produce.

We have fine-tuned our style a little bit but this is not radically different from the impression you would have got had you tasted the 1983 vintage.

One of the things that sets our Gewürztraminer apart from others is that it is not 100% Gewürztraminer. It typically is anywhere from seven to 10% of other varieties. Most of them are Muscats. Hawthorne Mountain Vineyard’s Gewürztraminer is 100% Gewürztraminer, produced in a different style. Our largest proportion of grapes for this wine comes from Hawthorne Mountain [a sister Vincor winery also formerly owned by McWatters and his partners]. We have the largest planting of Gewürztraminer, certainly in Canada and perhaps in North America. We have 65 acres of Gewürztraminer in one block at Hawthorne Mountain.

Question: Is there a lot of Muscat grown in B.C.?

McWatters: Yes. There are a lot of varieties, like Bacchus, that actually have a Muscat throwback. A lot of the Becker varieties that have a Muscat characteristic. For example: Schönburger. There is some Schönburger in our Private Reserve Gewürztraminer. We planted some Muscats for this. We have Morio Muscat, a German Muscat; some Perle of Czaba, a Hungarian Muscat. They are all in small quantities and they basically go into this wine.

Meritage
The Meritage concept started in California. There were a number of producers making a blend of Bordeaux varieties, as their high-end wines. Under the rules in the United States and elsewhere, they could not identify clearly what it was other than calling it simply Red Table Wine and that was a negative that did not bring the wines the attention they deserved. So the producers decided to identify a name they could trademark and market aggressively. They advertised in the Los Angeles Times. The prize was that the winner would get, in year one, two cases of each of the wines that were made by every producer, then one case each in the second year and then two bottles a year for as long as they lived. And the contest drew 6,300 entries.

They picked Meritage, for a number of reasons. It is a combination of merit and age. It sounds like heritage … and it is not French.

A friend of mine was the executive director of the Meritage Association. I asked, can we use it in Canada? He said, I don’t see why not, but I have to take it to my board. The guy that was then president of the Meritage Association was pretty definite about it: that they had already defined it as an American wine.

I went back and said: “Just think outside the box a bit. We may not be Americans. But think of it as North American and we are there.” It took some time to convince them. In 1993, they finally said: “We will not let you belong to our association but we won’t stop you from using the name. But we want to put some conditions around it.”

We agreed that we could trademark it and write it into our VQA standards. In Canada, Meritage not only has to meet the standards for Meritage, but must also be VQA.

In the last month or so, it has been decided that Meritage can be used by any country, as long as they comply. We just got our first producer from Israel accepted as a member of the Meritage Association.

Meritage is really a blend of Bordeaux varieties. We took the old world tradition from Bordeaux and put some parameters around what the rules would be. Initially, it had to be the top end of your blend of Bordeaux varieties. Today, that is not a hard and fast rule but it is pretty straight forward. You must use the Bordeaux varieties and they must be blended. No single variety can exceed 90% of the total blend.

Carmenère
For the reds, there are eight potential varieties. We had a bit of a disagreement. The association was going to knock Carmenère off the list because nobody in the United States was using it. I have gone to great lengths to source some budwood and I have grafted it and I am about to plant Carmenère. I found out this week that I will not be alone – somebody in the United States is actually doing the same thing. So we will see that variety included in Meritage. I am not sure that it is going to make the red wine taste radically different. But it will be another point of difference. For the amount of plants that I am propagating, it will be a struggle to get it to one per cent of the blend in the next couple of years. I have 1,500 Carmenère plants being propagated.

Carmenère is an ancient variety in Bordeaux. The five classic Bordeaux varieties for Meritage are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec, which I have. [The two other permitted red varieties are obscure -- Gros Verdot and St. Macaire.]

There are only three whites permitted in Meritage wines: Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon and Sauvignon Vert, or Muscadet. I don’t know anyone in North America growing that third white. I am trying to get some of that, too, not because I believe it will make a radical difference – I just want to be a little different.

Our 2003 White Meritage is 80% Sauvignon Blanc and 20% Sémillon. The Sémillon was really overripe; it could have been a late harvest wine. We fermented it cold in stainless steel, so we have a lot of Sémillon characteristic for a small amount in the blend. The Sauvignon Blanc is 100% barrel-fermented, about half in French and half in American oak, and predominantly new oak. The oak is noticeable but it is not overpowering, for two reasons. The fruit is so powerful in this that it stands up very well. And we fermented it in the oak, left it on the lees, and it really only stayed six or eight weeks in oak. It was not as if this was barrel-aged for a prolonged period of time.

We have been producing White Meritage since 1995 and Red Meritage since 1993. And we not have a vintage of this White Meritage where we did not win at least one really serious gold medal. It has won double gold on a number of occasions and it has done very well internationally. I am eager to put this up in almost any competition and let it speak for itself as being truly an outstanding world-class wine.

Red Meritage
Let’s talk about the Red Meritage. The 2001 vintage is 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, 25% each Merlot and Cabernet Franc. The vines are all exactly the same age. The three components here were barrel-selected after 15 months, blended and then bottled. This is unfined and unfiltered. A good portion of this juice would be free run juice.

In the mid 1990s, one of the most frequent comments I would listen to as a producer was that British Columbia makes some really good white wines – but do you really think you are going to make reds? How many people do you think are saying that now?

We planted the Black Sage Vineyard in 1993 and we planted 70% red in 100 acres. People thought I had lost my mind. George Heiss, a very good friend of mine [and a founder of Gray Monk Estate Winery], said: “I don’t know what you are doing, but when you get stuck, give me a call and I’ll see if I can take some off your hands.” We’ve never had the conversation. I wish I had planted 100% of reds. I wish I had bought more land.

Wine is an agricultural product and I think it is one of with a bright future in British Columbia.

Championing Merlot
Question: It is surprising that Syrah is now growing in the Okanagan?

McWatters: Syrah is not going to be our flagship because it can only grow today, before global selection and better clones, in a very small area. The same with Zinfandel, There are 10 acres of Zinfandel on Osoyoos Lake Bench but I don’t think I would be planting it in Summerland yet.

I am most excited about the varieties that we grow already. I have been excited for 30 years about Gewürztraminer. It is a variety we do well. I think we do our style better than anywhere in the world. The style of Gewürztraminer that our region makes is as good or better than anywhere in the world. I love Alsace Gewürztraminer but they don’t get it ripe like we do.

I feel largely the same about Pinot Blanc. It will be our workhorse, and you will see a divergence of styles. It’s a grower’s grape and gives economic stability for growers. I feel the same about Pinot Gris, although we don’t make it at Sumac Ridge.

In the reds, I would be very surprised if, in my lifetime, any variety shows as much success as Merlot. The market loves it. We happen to do a really a good job with it, as a region.

If you ask me what I like myself, I like Meritage better because it has more character. But as a single variety, there is no doubt. Thirty-one acres of my 100 acres at Black Sage is Merlot, and I am not sure I have enough. But I don’t have more land.