How we started Icellars - Part 6

Hello again,

We are on Part 6 of our journey into wine business and I am guessing there will be one or two more chapters of this. You can find all the chapters at our website www.icellars.ca/blog

As we became a fully licensed commercial winery in 2014, we were looking to take dedicated care of vineyard so we hired Craig Wismer to manage the vineyard with all of his equipment and crew. Even being a young man he had deep knowledge and passion in high quality vineyard maintenance.

A more important step was to find a consultant winemaker to guide us through winemaking. I had a very small experience and I needed an experienced brain to teach me how to make good wine. Craig introduced me Ross Wise in the summer of 2014. He came to our winery and checked the non existent cellar equipment. I had blue bins as fermenters, a very small destemmer and a hand wine press. I guess he believed in my vision to create a winery from scratch and accepted to consult me. In the three vintages we worked togather, I learned so much from him as he was an excellent source of information with an unmatched palate. Ross moved to Okanagan and now he is the head winemaker of Black Hills Winery and recently received his Master of Wine title (one of the 400 in the world).

We had a small first harvest in 2014 about 20 barrels worth of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. I had two barrels of Cabernet Franc which was tasting amazing after a 6 months barrel aging. One day I and my older son Arda was racking the barrels. Racking is done to get rid of the sediments at the bottom barrels by siphoning out the wine to a temporary steel tank, cleaning the barrel and putting back the wine to barrels. Since I did not have a proper pump I was doing this by gravity, lifting with forklift. Two Cabernet Franc barrels were emptied, barrels were cleaned and I lifted the stainless steel tanks 4 feet above ground to fill. But I pulled the wrong stick and the two 300 liter steel tanks fell to the ground.The whole winery floor was covered with an amazing smelling wine as it was draining out. I lost 400 liters of wine with one mistake and I needed to proove this to the LCBO/VQA that I lost this wine by taking pictures. I will never forget this and my wife Elif is still trying to keep me away from forklift. 

As you see in the above 2014 Arinna label, it had only 1% Cabernet Franc in the final blend because that was all that I could save.

I should also mention about our label design. We hired Maximillian Kaiser to design wine labels for us. After a few months of work on the materials that we supplied to him, he came up with a deer logo that we happily adopted. The deer on our logo is a European Fallow Deer (Dama Dama) which is native to our home country Turkiye. And also if you look to its direction, it is symbolizing our move to Canada, from East to West but still keeping an eye in the old country.

To be continued

Adnan icel
Owner&Winemaker