Paul Speck: Well, we’ve been making wine since 1988. It was our first vintage. The original vineyards went underground in 1984, so we’re coming around to pretty close to 20 years now of winemaking. A little longer when you add the original vineyards in.
Daniel Speck: We were raised in Toronto as kids and came out here on summers and weekends over many, many years to get things started. Our father is from this area and he grew up in Niagara. And his family, his great, great grandfather Nicolas Smith was the first settler on this back in the 1790’s, and they cleared the land. Henry, one of Nicolas’s sons planted some of the first vineyards probably anywhere in this area. And certainly in our family so that we rekindled the tradition of grape growing, the lands had vines on it that dated back to Henry when we bought the land but they were varieties that we wouldn’t use for winemaking today and so we planted the vineyards ourselves.
Paul Speck: That was, I was delivering pizzas in Queen west in Toronto so I was more concerned about getting that pizza there in under 30 minutes, or I get trouble from the boss. It was really our dad’s idea. He’s grown up in this area, and in the early ‘80’s there’s a deep recession. It was not a great time. Interest rates went through the roof and our cousins were essentially fire selling the original piece of land, and so he bought it really for sentimental reasons, to keep it in the family, and he initially wanted to come out here and retire. And one thing led to another, and it became like a family project, and we started to study what was the best thing to do with this land, and lo and behold, it became enough for a grape variety. It was what our main focus was. And so we planted those in ’84, and that was really my dad’s idea and then it was his idea that started the winery in ’88. His idea was to just have a very small winery and again, he’d retire out here and pour some wine and you know, do what everybody thinks the wine business is. And so we worked on it with him. And then he got sick very early you know, and after that, and I graduated from the university, and I said, “I’ll help you out for a year”, and then I stayed and Matt said well he’ll help me out for a year and then he stayed when he graduated. Then when Dan graduated, he said he’ll help me out, us out for a year and then he stayed. So we kind of just grew into it really and you know, it was an exciting time at that time because there, VQA, we were involved in writing the VQA rule. There was no premium wine industry, and all three of us studied philosophies so it was either you know, go get a degree or you can actually get a job, or hang out in the wine business and see what you can do with this. And it was kind of a very interesting to be in the Niagara wine business. It’s very entrepreneurial, and it was a time when we were rewriting the rules completely, until what this industry was going to be and I think it suited all our personalities at that time.
Daniel Specks: Mostly we do trial and error. We started with planting the vineyards with a lot of error and fixing that, those things up. And developing our technique on the you know, hands on. Winemaking came a little bit later after the first vintage and we brought up the professional winemaker in at that stage, and along the way it became you know, professional grape growers in ourselves.
Paul Speck: Actually it was very excellent. 1988 was our first vintage. We made a very small amount of wine. And I still remember there’s two wines that I, rather three wines that I remember out of that vintage. We did a Chardonnay that was very light and delicate. We only made a couple hundred cases of it. We made our Riesling which was still very signature and really in a style that we still carry on today. And of course that was the year when we introduced a very full-bodied Baco noir that nobody really in Niagara or Canada has tasted before. And that wine really took off and it was quite memorable.
I just counted this because somebody asked me that recently. We have nine varieties and so anywhere from Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, through the Bordo varieties, Bacco, Gamin and Pinot Noir, so it’s quite a good mix. It’s a fairly eclectic mix but it, once that we’re all very, very confident, grow very, very well in our soils here in Surehill Bench, very consistently and will be made quality wine over the long haul.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services