Business in Vancouver's “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Jim Wyse talks about how the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and terroir – the right combination of soil, sun and geography – all helped to make his family's Burrowing Owl Estate Winery so successful.
“I was in the development business for 35 years in Vancouver, and we were doing a project in Vernon. There was an advertisement in the local papers advertising a winery for sale.
“I followed that lead only to discover that it was not a good prospect, but the information I had acquired during this investigative process indicated that there might be a real opportunity in simply growing wine grapes.
“It was pure happenstance that a Kelowna realtor specializing in vineyard properties brought me to look at the two 100-plus-acre properties that we subsequently bought.
“Our vineyard and winery is located halfway between Osoyoos and Oliver on the east side of the valley on the Black Sage Bench, which has turned out to be one of the finest vineyards in Canada, judging by the results that everybody on that bench is getting. It's west-facing, and you get all that late-afternoon sunshine.
“The industry at that time was right in the tank. This was five years after the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. [Then-prime minister Brian] Mulroney had paid all the vineyard owners of the time $7,000 to $8,000 an acre to pull out the varieties of grapes that were then growing, which were French hybrids. They never made really great wine. The government was protecting an uneconomic product. The best thing that ever happened with the B.C. wine industry was Free Trade because it got rid of all the French hybrids.
“In '93 we started. The hunters had gone up there and shot up all the irrigation system, so we had to rebuild everything. It cost around $15,000 to $20,000 an acre to replant and build irrigation.
“We decided just to be a vineyard. We were going to sell grapes to the commercial wineries around. But things we were selling to third parties, we discovered fairly quickly, were winning very good prizes. This gave us pause to rethink the idea about not doing a winery. So we decided in '97 to design and build a 10,000-case winery. The winery was built in '98.
“When planning the facility, we left room to add a restaurant on top of the cellar area. The concept was to add these facilities when the wine had taken hold, and the restaurant would complement our brand-building efforts.
“B.C. was not known for its high-quality wines in 1998, and we had anticipated a lengthy period of educating the public about our products. We saw the restaurant as part of that overall scheme.
“As things turned out, the public was way ahead of us, and when the restaurant opened it was profitable from Day 1.
“We wanted to enhance the experience of people coming to the winery, so we doubled the size of the cellar in 2005 and built a guest house.
