Trader quits Bay Street grind for Niagara wine
But she still has ‘10 balls up in the air’ at her father’s boutique winery
From Bay Street to vineyard, in one sudden step.
It’s only an hour-and-a-half drive from the towers of Bay Street to the green fields of Niagara wine country. For Sue Enrich, it was a journey to a new and radically different world.
In January, Enrich took the plunge many only dream of, leaving behind her career as a preferredshare trader for TD Securities to become the manager of a winery and a food market in the heart of Niagara.
“I left TD, packed a suitcase and started living on Line 7,” she says.
Some might find it a shock to swap lives overnight, but Enrich says it’s been pure adventure. “I love what I’m doing!” How does a 39-year-old stock trader get hired to run a winery and a food store?
Family. Both the winery and the market belong to her father, Joe Enrich, a mechanical engineer who got the wine bug a few years back and ended up buying the Rancourt Winery a year ago.
The small boutique winery had been run by Lorraine Rancourt since the death of her husband, Lionel, in 2007. After the sale, she agreed to stay on, overseeing the vineyards and the winemaking.
Rancourt sells most of the wine through its own shop. When the Harvest Barn food market became available right across the road, Enrich seized the opportunity for a potential new outlet.
His daughter was leaving her bank job and looking for something new. The timing was perfect. “It was a good opportunity for Sue to make a mid-life change,” Joe Enrich says. Enrich had to learn the food and wine businesses from the ground up while running the market and the winery. To bone up on their wine knowledge, she and her father are taking courses to pursue a sommelier accreditation. “I started off reading Canadian Wine for Dummies,” she confesses. She’s learning the food business on the job. She arrives at the Harvest Barn at 7 a.m. to set things up before spending the day changing prices, meeting suppliers, running errands — learning everything she can. In between, she receives visitors at the winery, works on the website, delivers wine to restaurants and helps plan Rancourt’s competition entries. “I have 10 balls in the air, and I’m trying not to let any of them hit me in the head,” she laughs. There’s also planning. She and her father want to expand Rancourt by adding the Harvest Barn’s 12 acres of vineyards to the winery’s eight acres, acquiring an estate winery licence so they can produce more wine, and adding a wine shop to the food market.
It’s early days. With the young vines just beginning to flower in the vineyards, there’s a lot more to learn before her first vintage is in the bottle.
She has no regrets over leaving Toronto. “I haven’t looked back.”