Building up the little winery that could
Andrzej Lipinski worked at several wineries learning before going out on his own.
The old joke goes: How do you make a small fortune by starting a winery? Start with a large fortune. Like lots of jokes it’s only funny because it’s usually true. Especially in Ontario, where costs run high, the climate poses challenges and the struggles are real. But one Polish immigrant who arrived with no wine experience and zero capital is turning that old adage on its ear.
His name is Andrzej Lipinski. And he is emerging — through sheer grunt work — as one of the top winemakers in Ontario now earning a steady stream of domestic and international accolades for his bottles. And his winery — Big Head Wines — is only about seven years old.
“Very hard working guy. Huge work ethic, that guy,” says John Howard, who hired Lipinski in 1991, when he first arrived from Poland.
“He worked for a stonemason who had done a huge amount of work for me. Then, as the job ended, Andrzej needed a job. I owned Vineland Estates Winery at the time. So I gave him a job there.”
That was 1994. Throughout the rest of the ’90s, Lipinski worked long, hard hours seven days a week at the winery, doing whatever needed to be done.
“For me, I needed a job. I had a wife and two children,” he tells me with compassionate eyes and a thick Polish accent over a glass of wine. “My wife and kids were coming to see me because when I left they were sleeping. When I came home they were sleeping.”
Coupled with his admirable work ethic was his keen mind.
“If I was working at the winery, I thought, I’d like to learn. So I started to drink wine and attend tastings and seminars with Brian Schmidt.”
Schmidt was the winemaker at Vineland Estates at the time, and still is. The two men are still good friends.
“Andrzej ’s work ethic is like nothing you can ever imagine,” Schmidt tells me over the phone. “To this day, there is no one in Ontario that has that work ethic. I gave him the title of assistant winemaker in 1996.”
In some ways, this is where the story begins.
In 1998, Lipinski was invited to make a few barrels of wine himself. And his first cuvée won a gold medal at the prestigious international wine competition Vinitaly in April 2000. It was the 1998 Vineland Chardonnay Reserve.
“We started selling that wine at $48 per bottle,” Lipinski says. “Then, a few months later you know when people start buying that, was $95 bottle. And at the time you know $48 was expensive wine in Canada.”
Word got around and other Ontario wineries began hiring him to help make their wine including Fielding Estate, Megalomaniac, Organized Crime, Foreign Affair and others. He played the field like this until about 2011, when he decided to open his own winery with his son, Jakub, who was fresh out of university and working at a restaurant in Banff.
“I remember the phone call well,” says Jakub, who is now 33 years old and runs the operations and marketing for the winery. “My dad said — and I remember the call well. I can tell you where I was and what I was doing. My dad said, ‘We are opening a winery. You’re coming home.’ It wasn’t a question.”
When he shares this story with me, a boyish smile appears on his face. His admiration for his father is palpable. And side-by-side, the two men could not look more similar. Which brings us to the winery’s name — Big Head Wines.
“Jakub asked what we’d call it,” Andrzej says. “I said, ‘Maybe the Lipinski Winery?’ He says, ‘You know, dad, Polish people don’t make wine.’
“Then a couple weeks on, he said to me ‘What about Big Head?’ My mother was always telling me my head was too big for clothes and everything. She had to get things adjusted, you know. And when Jakub was young working at Vineland (Estates Winery) washing dishes, they called him Big Head.”
Jakub concurs. “I was teased a lot when I was a kid. Because I only grew shoulders recently. When I went to university, I kind of filled out.”
With the winery name decided, Andrzej got a loan, bought equipment, set up a small shed behind Cornerstone Estate Winery in Niagara and began making his own wine and has never looked back.
The first vintage of Big Head wine was 2012.
It was a modest 2,600 cases that sold out quickly. In 2013, he made 3,100 cases. And by 2014, he moved his winemaking facilities to a small shed at 304 Hunter Rd. in Niagara-onthe-Lake — where the winery now exists — and opened their doors to the public on April 4, 2015. Momentum picked up and by 2017, Big Head Wines was selling 24,000 cases sold strictly from the winery. The wines are not available at the LCBO.
“I don’t sell to the LCBO because I don’t want them to take all the money,” Andrzej says.
Clearly, the LCBO has never been a necessary sales avenue for Big Head Wines anyway.
“The wines were selling through too quickly and we were always worried about running out of product,” says Jakub.
The place has been booming ever since, with both men hustling hard. Andrzej makes the wine and Jakub markets it and runs the business side.
I remember first meeting Andrzej at Soho House Toronto back in 2015 when he tracked me down to tell me about his family’s new winery. I was intrigued, so went to visit Andrzej shortly after. I recall him insisting I taste all 14 of his wines and guess the grape variety and alcohol level of each. He was testing me as much as I was testing him — that was clear. But he passed with flying colours. His wines were clean, smart expressions — well-balanced and pristine across the board. I was impressed then, and still am.
The winery is now wildly successful with high prices, admirable accolades and strong sales. A homegrown rags to riches story.
The Lipinskis just purchased a bigger winery at 823 Line Six in Niagara-on-the-Lake that they’re renovating and plan to open in the spring.
“This will be their forever home,” Jakub says with that boyish grin again.
So that punch line for the old joke about how to make a small fortune in wine? Just a tad less amusing.