MEET THE MAKER: THE CAT’S MEOW
With Kitten Swish, Brad Royale and Mark Kuspira scratch the itch to make wine without having to give up their day jobs.
With Kitten Swish, Brad Royale and Mark Kuspira scratch the itch to make wine without having to give up their day jobs.
we’re not being catty here. We’re just telling it like it is: unless you’re a serious local wine lover, the name Kitten Swish probably doesn’t conjure up images of great vintages from some of the world’s top wine regions.
Not yet, anyway, but Calgary sommelier Brad Royale is changing that, one sip at a time. The wine director for Canadian Rocky Mountain Resorts, he is also one-half, with the wine importer Mark Kuspira, of Kitten Swish, a small wine micro-negociant business that will celebrate its seventh anniversary this spring with the release of several new vintages.
Like the first bottles released in 2012, all are limited-production, with quirky names and labels derived from photos taken by Royale. There’s Call Me, a 2016 Zinfandel from the renowned Stuhlmuller vineyard in Sonoma, California; the label features a rotary phone. And Below the Surface, a 2013 Tempranillo from Rioja, Spain, which features a photo of entwined bodies and is a tribute to the unsung heroes behind every bottle: the growers, printers, graphic designers, shippers, importers. “It’s about all that effort that we forget about when we just grab a bottle off the shelf,” Royale says. “This is a tip of the hat toward what goes into making a great bottle of wine.”
As a teenager looking for a career, Royale never intended to make wine or, for that matter, sell it. Born in Calgary, he grew up in Saskatoon, but returned to his birthplace to study architecture at SAIT. To help pay the bills, he landed a job at the Eau Claire Wine Market and his dreams of becoming the next Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright began to slip away. “I had to call my parents to borrow money because I’d spent my tuition money on wine,” Royale says. Not every parent would be sympathetic, but Royale’s mother and father could see that he’d found what he loved to do, so they encouraged him. He began to study wine seriously, first with the International Sommelier Guild and then DIPP with the Wine and Spirit Education Trust in England. He worked as a sommelier at Teatro and then Bin 905 before becoming the wine director for the Canadian Rocky Mountain Resorts hotels and restaurants, including Cilantro and Emerald Lake Lodge.
In 2011, however, he realized he wanted to make wine, too. “But Calgary is rather viticulturally challenged,” he says. “I knew I was going to have to go someplace else to do it.” The problem was that he loved (and still loves) his sommelier gig. “I have one of the world’s greatest wine jobs,” he says, “and I didn’t want to leave it.” Becoming a negociant— choosing and buying wine from established wineries and bottling it under his own label—was the ideal compromise. He could get hands-on winemaking experience without leaving his regular job. “Not everyone who puts out wine owns a vineyard or even makes their own wine,” he says.
As for the name he and Kuspira chose for their business, Royale says they, “wanted the brand name to be playful and interesting and memorable, too.” “Kitten” satisfies the playful requirement. As for “Swish” it is both classy and not a bad way to enjoy the wine.