A life in the wine trade
EDITOR’S NOTE: In recognition of Canada’s 150th birthday, The Herald is running historic stories from our archives. This feature on wine guru Harry McWatters first appeared in February 2007 and has been edited with several updates added.
Harry McWatters was just a youngster in Toronto when his parents served him his first small glass of wine with dinner. “I grew up in a household where wine was part of what we did,” he said. “We lived in a predominantly Italian neighbourhood and my mother was the kind of gal who baked bread every day and took bread to the neighbours — and in return, we always had a jug of homemade Italian wine.”
His family later moved to North Vancouver and at age 16, McWatters started making his own wines, admittedly with mixed results.
“It wasn’t very good wine, but I managed to drink it occasionally myself,” he recalled.
“By the time I was 18, I was making wines that other people would venture to try a little bit.”
No one could have guessed at the time that McWatters was destined to become one of the driving forces behind the B.C. wine industry’s evolution into the international award-winner it is today.
By 1968, McWatters had started working as a sales representative for the newly-established Casabello winery in Penticton, founded by local businessman Evans Lougheed.
“In the ’60s, there certainly weren’t a lot of people with the experience of selling Canadian wine,” he said.
“People didn’t even want to admit to drinking Canadian wine.”
However, Lougheed managed to persuade McWatters that Casabello produced some quality wines and had a solid future for a 24year-old executive.
“When people look back, they think the B.C. wine industry is something that has just happened here, but that’s just not the case,” he said.
“There’s no question the level of wine that is produced here today is significantly different than what it was in the ’60s, but that doesn’t mean all the wines made in the ’60s were not good wines.”
The market was consumer-driven, just as it is today.
“The best wines we made in those days were the toughest sells because people weren’t ready for dry table wines,” he said.
“I talk about the consumers in those days as being in two categories — those that took it out of the brown paper bags and those that didn’t.” BOOMERS CAUGHT ON During the early 1970s, fruity sparkling wines were the mainstay of the B.C. wine industry. While such ‘pop wines’ never won any international awards, they did introduce the growing young market of the Baby Boom generation to the world of wine. Later, sweet non-sparkling wines with Germanic-sounding names were dominant in the domestic market. That, too, has evolved and today the Okanagan Valley is the second largest producer of Ehrenfelser wines in the world — second only to Germany. Provincial regulations governing the production of wine began to change too. The first cottage wineries opened during the 1970s and McWatters was co-founder of the first estate winery — Sumac Ridge in Summerland — in 1981. Estate wineries were allowed to produce up to 136,000 litres (30,000 gallons) for sales in B.C., compared to a 91,000-litre (20,000 gallons) production limit for cottage wineries. Casabello by that time had been purchased by Labatt Breweries. McWatters and then-partner Lloyd Schmidt decided to leave their jobs at the Penticton winery, and take what was considered a huge risk in opening the province’s first estate winery. They acquired the nine-hole Sumac Ridge golf course from the Parker family and planted grapes in some of the fairways. Its location, off Highway 97 at the northern entrance to Summerland, was considered the key. “A lot of people thought we had lost our mind. It was a huge leap of faith,” he said. “I guess that’s the beauty of being a lot younger — you’re a little less cautious.” The wine shop at Sumac Ridge opened on July 11, 1981. With interest rates as high as 25 per cent, the early 1980s were a tough time to open a new business.
“Those were very, very lean years. Our payroll was very sparse.” he recalled. “It was family, and I can tell you that lots of paydays got missed because we needed equipment and just had to forge ahead.”
Sumac Ridge put out 4,500 cases in its first year of production. In 2006, it produced about 80,000 cases.
Marketing was extremely frustrating for McWatters, even when people chose B.C. wines over international wines in blind taste tests.
Government regulations in those days also forebade wine sales on Sundays. Wine-tasting could only take place with food in the golf course clubhouse. Monday, therefore was the biggest sales day of the week, as people would order their wine on Sunday and actually buy it on Monday.
However, McWatters rode out the rollercoaster of those early years and gradually more and more estate wineries came along. Sumac Ridge was eventually purchased in 2000 by Vincor, Canada’s biggest wine company.
Vincor also owns Hawthorne Mountain winery overlooking Okanagan Falls (relabelled as See Ya Later Ranch for its premium wines), as well as Jackson Triggs and the Black Sage Vineyards near Oliver.
Vincor has since been purchased by Constellation Brands of New York, the world’s biggest wine company.
McWatters also found the job of promoting Sumac Ridge and promoting the B.C. wine industry in general were intertwined. He became the founding president of the Okanagan Wine Festivals Society, which now oversees one of the premier tourism events in North America.
“It’s gone way beyond what I ever believed it could be,” he said. “The evolution was phenomenal.”
“The biggest pivotal change that took place in our industry was the Free Trade Agreement.” he said.
“For the wine industry, any preferential treatment went away way more rapidly than it did for any other commodity.
Within the next two years, 50 per cent of the mark-up protection for Canadian wines was eliminated, with the remainder gone over the next five years.
“Anybody who read the paper in those days read about the doom and gloom that was going to happen in our industry. Whether you were a grape grower or a winery, the chance of survival looked pretty damn slim.”
In 1988, there were 3,400 acres of grapes in the province, seven commercial wineries and seven estate wineries. They quickly got together to work out a new strategy for survival — with provincial government assistance.
McWatters again was front-and-centre as founding chairman of the B.C. Wine Institute, which convinced the government to allow wineries to sell direct to the consumer, with increased quality control standards through what would become the industry’s trademark VQA (Vintners’ Quality Assurance) program.
The province allocated $28 million, mainly as compensation to grape growers who were forced to remove their hybrid grapes. They could then replant with premium vinifera grapes, get out of the business entirely, or start their own farmgate winery. MORE COMING McWatters resigned as president of the Sumac Ridge Wine Group in 2008, but stayed on as a consultant to Vincor.
In 2011, he created a new line of wines, McWatters Collection, then launched Evolve Cellars with his daughter in Summerland in 2015.
Last year, he purchased the old Penmar Theatre on Martin Street in downtown Penticton. The space is still under renovation, and expected to reopen later this year as Time Winery.
When it does reopen, it will be the first urban winery in Penticton since Casabello closed.