Is this remote community the next big thing in B.C. wine?

Everyone kind of said, you can't grow grapes in Creston. It's too cold. Someone had to take the plunge and the risk to invest in it. Creston is mostly a growing community. I think it got settled in the early 1900s, even earlier probably. And it's mostly been farming, mining, and forestry. The first winery that got established in the valley was Kimmelhorn. And then after that, Bailey Groman came in. After that it was... Wynwood Cellar in Wendel, just north of town. We came in eight years ago and last year Wynwood Cellar closed the door. So now we're back to three wineries. Yes. We got into the winemaking because it was just a passion of ours. We just moved to Creston, bought a chunk of land and started making wine. So these are Gewurztraminer, they're one of the best grapes that grow in the Creston Valley just because they ripen a little bit earlier and they retain a lot of acidity and just lots of aromatics so they're really nice grapes. So that's like 22 bricks. We can pick those this week. On to the next. The remoteness of Creston is a challenge. All the big centers are very far but the community was over the top. Bailey Groman is a winery in the Creston Valley in the Kootenays and it was started by my parents back in 2007 and now Mir and I have taken it over. This is our fifth year running the winery with us. My father-in-law really pushed getting Kootenays on the map as a designated wine growing region. Back in 2018 Kootenays got the BCBQA appellation. It is still relatively new, I mean, especially in the terms of the wine world, right? Like, we're 20 years in the ground now. Yeah, it's still really exciting, though, to be a part of it. Right now, we are just going into harvest. This is the fun part. Sorry about that. We're in this big valley, and we have a big body of water just north of us, the Kootenay Lake. And I'm being surrounded by the South Cork and Purcells Mountains. We have this sort of little microclimate, which is incredible. We are a fairly cool climate growing region with a little bit higher elevation. I think we're 300 meters above the Okanagan, which is sort of the main region that everyone thinks about when they think about BC wine. It definitely encourages us to grow certain varieties. We also have really beautiful soils here. It's glacial till and a lot of clay. And the benefit that I see it now is that it has a lot of water holding capacity. And in sort of the day and the age of water sustainability that people are quite concerned about, we don't actually have to water the vineyard that much. I think the biggest concern that we have is sort of the extremes. In 2024 we lost our entire crop. It went down to minus 27 and some. So what happened is that the vine just froze dead. So in the spring of 2024 we had to regrow the entire vineyard. and re-establish all the vines from scratch pretty much so we're starting to get into hybrids a little bit more just just in case it happened again this block here we planted that three years ago and uh we weren't really sure what to put in here we wanted to go all fancy and put like Viognier and Chardonnay and all that stuff and then uh the big frost came in so we're like no put hybrids in and then they'll they'll do the trick hybrids will survive at minus 30. So if, if there's another year like 2024 that's happening, then we'll be, at least we'll have grapes here. Yeah, it's okay. Life happens. We're a tight-knit community so, you know, we all make it work together, which is awesome. We share equipment. We borrow a bottling line when we bottle our Titicaca from Redbird and they bottle our corker when they do their bottling. So it's So it's very much a sharing kind of equipment and knowledge between us. Redbird initially took cuttings from our Gewurztraminer to plant their vineyard. Making sure that everyone was making as good of wine as possible was sort of really important to us, and if we could help them out with that, we would. I think success is contagious. At this point, we're not fighting against each other, you know? We're working together to expose the entire valley. When we first started, it's like pushing this big boulder, right? You're pushing, pushing, pushing and working hard and working hard. And then eventually the boulder is going to start rolling by itself down the hill. The most rewarding of all that would be to see people enjoying the wine. Like you just blew their mind with the wine that they're drinking. That is, yeah, that's the part where like, oh, it grabs you inside, right? People who love BC wine should know about Creston because we produce really beautiful aromatic wines here, well balanced with acidity and we're a fun group of people making them.