Wine boss pouring heart out for charity
It was the most expensive Pinot Noir he’s ever had. Andrew von Teichman — in the proverbial callowness of youth — was working in a New Zealand winery, doing something that’s called a pump-over: “You take the wine from one tank that you’re filtering it in and go into another tank.”
It was around 10 a.m. The apprentice eventually was lured into taking a small break.
Coming back into the winery, minutes later, he remembers hearing what “sounded like a shower” and promptly noticing that the seal on the pump had broken.
“There was a geyser, 50 feet high, up till the ceiling,” he paints the horror scene now, some 20 years later. “And it must have been going for 15 minutes, at a heavy pump.” It turned out — sante! — they had just lost $50,000 worth of “Grade-A Pinot Noir.”
After going full CSI and doing an inspection of the pump, it was concluded that it was those one-in-amillion things; “it just happened.” No, he wasn’t going to be deported. Adds von Teichman now, with a bit of wryness, “Everybody calls it the Heartbreak Grape (presumably because Pinot Noir is so famously fickle in the vineyard) . . . but I have a different take on the heartbreak.”
All part of the matriculation of an ardent oenophile — one who, in the years since, has turned into a sort of Forrest Gump in the Ontario wine scene.
Having literally grown up in the wine world — cleaning barrels and pruning grapes during summers at his family-owned Pelee Island Winery — von Teichman has succeeded in showing up in any number of guises in an ever-expanding industry.
Sitting with me at John & Sons Oyster House on Temperance St. the other day — in a chambray shirt and giving off a well-scrubbed Neil Patrick Harris-ness — von Teichman laid out the bullet points: designing the first e-commerce wine website in Canada while still a student at the University of Western Ontario; earning his papers to become an actual sommelier; going back into the trenches at Pelee Island where he continued to hone things on the business side (doing mainly restaurant sales); then, for three years, a post at Vincor (Canada’s largest wine producer), later starting his own wine distribution agency.
His latest venture? Teaming up with his mentor, the legendary Allan Jackson — the Jackson in JacksonTriggs — to create Union Wines.
When offered the opportunity, von Teichman recalls now, he called his wife, Natalie, from the car, who kept it real. “Why you?” she asked. “Thanks!” he told her.
Cue the charming, sardonic missus. She soon joins us at the restaurant, where the duo settle into bantering about their upside-down home life (they have four boys un- der the age of 7, including a set of twins) and her own job in another life (“I sold Viagra,” she says about her days at Pfizer) and yet another wine launch, one that seems as much as a passion for her as it is for him.
“Don’t Poke the Bear,” the mister begins to say, pointing to a bottle at our table. Don’t, indeed — a fairly droll name for a wine but an unmissable Canadiana one. Launched last year, and available now at the LCBO, the label actually reads “D’Ont Poke the Bear” and features a photo of a bear with an eye patch.
Turns out the story behind the image is a pretty personal one. Andrew had to wear an eye patch in Grade 1 (he had a lazy eye) and experienced some semblance of bullying back then. The feeling has forever stayed with the winemaker (especially now, as the father of four boys) and, as a result, he plans to donate $1 for each bottle sold during Ontario Wine Month (on until mid-October) to an anti-bullying foundation created by him and his wife called Friends First, with a smaller portion of the profits going toward the same organization in perpetuity.
“It’s about empowering . . . but also about awareness and being empathetic,” Natalie says. She’s quarterbacking the charity. The wine — both the name and the label — has inevitably turned a lot of heads. Andrew, for instance, tells the story of a doctor, who works with facial deformities in children, whom he met during an LCBO appearance. Once he heard the anti-bullying back story, the doc told him, “This is all I see everyday.”
Our conversation flaps about. We talk about a trip the couple made this past summer to Puglia (to go live amongst the vineyards, for another label they’re launching together called Nasa Contadino, loosely translated as “peasant’s nose”) and then touch on the “elemental nature” of winemaking itself (horticulture, luck of the soil, the whims of weather).
At one point, their farm north of the city comes up; that’s where plans are afoot to build an indoor skating rink in a barn for the coming season. Finally, they let it slip — in vino veritas — that Andrew had a vasectomy recently. “We’re done!” his wife announces. “Well, it is reversible,” I editorialize, should they decide to hold out for that elusive daughter.
“What if we have another set of twins?” Andrew wonders out loud. “And boys!”
Yeah, maybe best to stick to growing grapes.