How we started Icellars - Part 7

Hello again,

We are on Part 7 of our journey into wine business and I promise I will wrap up this series next week. You can find all the chapters at our website www.icellars.ca/blog

We had a very late spring frost on May 23, 2015 night. We did not have budget for a wind machine and lost 90% of Chardonnay&Pinot Noir grapes and 50% of others. One night' frost damage was about $300,000 worth of wine for us. With this though lesson, we were forced to buy a $60,000 wind machine in a very tight budget.

On May 14th of 2016, we finally opened our tasting room and retail store. We still keep a picture of our first sale. That $35 was the first money that had ever come to the business after 6 years of sweat, blood, tears, laughs and debt.

On the opening day, our then neighbour winery patriarch Jerry of Coyote's Run himself with two of their retail staff came to help us for our first day. I will never forget this gesture.

Even we were hit by a late spring frost in 2015, the quality grapes were phenomonal. The wines of 2015 turned to be so high quality wine critic Michael Pinkus gave some of the highest ratings to our Arinna, Cabernet Sauvignon and Wiyana Wanda. Another wine critic David Lawrason gave 93 points to our 2015 Wiyana Wanda. Distinguished Treadwell Restaurant put all of our wines onto their menu and they started selling most of our small production.

We crafted and bottled 2015 wines with Ross Wise. He said all the 2015 wines were top notch and if we send them to any wine competition they would easily get gold medal. Especially our 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon and Arinna got 4.5+ stars from wine critic Michael Pinkus. So I decided to send 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon ($50 retail) to an Ontario wine competition and when the results came, our wine got nothing, not even a bronze. I thought there must be a mistake, and contacted the organizers. They e-mailed me my wine got 85 points which was very low for that quality of wine. I investigated further bought all of the gold, silver and bronze winning Cabernets and did a blind tasting at the winery with 5 other people who have not tasted any of them before. Everybody without exception picked our Cabernet as the best wine blindly.

One of the bronze winners was from a 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon at $14.95 from a very large winery So they picked the grapes on November 2016, fermented it, aged in barrels for 2 months. Then bottled in March 2017 and sent to the competition in April 2017 and they got a medal. I felt there must be something wrong with these competitions.

Later I was told by industry veterans regardless how good is your wine, the chances of getting a medal directly depends on how many wines you are sending to them. That big winery sent 30-40 wines every year and paid them $100 per wine. We were not an important client for the organizers with only one wine entry. We have never sent any wines to them again and will not send.

That 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon got excellent reviews from paying customers and sold out quickly.

Just before the harvest of 2016 Ross told me that he was offered a winemaker position in Okanagan, BC at a very big winery and he was moving there permanently in a few weeks. But he also offered me to talk to another consultant winemaker to replace him. I said sure but he/she must be as good as him. He brought Ann Sperling and her husband Peter Gamble to our winery. After tasting of our wines, Ann e-mailed me we were making high quality wines and they would happily consult me starting with the 2016 vintage.

To be continued

With prices of everything is incrasing sharply, we have not increased our wine prices, we are just absorbing cost increases for now. It is a very good time to buy from your local wineries.

Adnan icel
Owner&Winemaker