Award winning winery nestled in the heart of Alberta

“This was a wheat field before we bought it. We planted every bush here pretty well. The first year we planted 50,000 plants, 30,000 Saskatoons and 20,000 raspberry canes our first year,” said Marvin Gill, who partnered with his wife and siblings.

A love for wine was part of why they opted to start a winery. In the beginning, because none of them had much experience in making wine, they decided to hire expert Dominic Rivard.

When the orchard was planted in 1998 there weren’t wine laws in place in Alberta. In 2002 they approached Alberta Gaming and Liquor and were told there was a major review being done on all of the policies and that looking at adding regulations for a cottage winery couldn’t be done at that time. It took until 2005 before all of the regulations were in place to govern this industry. 

“When we planted we really didn’t know for sure if we were going to be able to have the winery,” said Gill. 

“This has given us an opportunity to get into a whole province where there was no wineries to start with, and so for us to start a cottage winery gives us an opportunity to get to our customer base pretty directly.”

Anyone who has tried growing fruit in Alberta knows that it is no easy task. Often times the inconsistent weather can affect a crop, such as the warm winter from last year. The warm weather from the winter saw the raspberries the hardest hit. Strawberries were also quite badly hit, but the Saskatoon berries were okay. Gill said they lost 90 per cent of their crop. 

The fruit wine industry has changed over the years. No longer are they the overly sweet, almost syrupy wines. Fruit wine sales are growing an average of 30 per cent a year, while traditional red and white wines are increasing by about five per cent per year.

Gill said the process is a little different for a fruit wine than it is for a grape wine. The berries don’t all ripen all at once and generally the picking season is fairly long, beginning usually in mid July and ending around the second week of September. 

“We’re accumulating food all summer and are just picking it and freezing it, that’s all we do is just pick and freeze. There’s two advantages to that, we can make as large or as small a batch as we want to because we can just thaw however much we want,” said Gill. 

“Secondly we can delay our wine making until the fall and winter. When we’re in our busy season with the orchard we really don’t have time to make wine anyways so having it all frozen is a big advantage. Thirdly when you freeze and then thaw berries they give you more juice than if you were trying to press them fresh.”

One great thing about Alberta, said Gill, is the fact that our province and only two others in Canada allow cottage wineries to sell their wines at farmer’s markets.

“We have the ability there to reach a much larger audience of people than if everybody was trying to drive here,” said Gill.

Every year it’s different for what might be considered the most popular wine. In the past few years the bumbleberry wine has been quite popular, said Gill, and this year it seems to be the strawberry rhubarb that is flying off the shelves. His favourites, though, remain the cherry flavoured ones.

“In the dessert wines we have a very unique one called wild black cherry which is actually made from choke cherries, and it has some very unique characteristics and has a lot of spicy, clove, cinnamon type finishes on it. It’s probably my favourite dessert wine,” said Gill. 

The first year, in 2005, Field Stone Fruit Wines bottled 5,500 litres of wine. This year they have bottled approximately 28,000 litres. 

“The first wine bottled…I think it was the bumbleberry,” said Gill. 

Right from the very beginning Field Stone began entering the wines into contests as a way to begin establishing credibility into their name and company. 

“In this business you may sell a bottle of wine to one person once but the idea is to keep them coming back because they like your wine. Quality of the wine is absolutely the most paramount of anything so establishing that through competitions is a really good way to do that,” said Gil. 

This year was the biggest medal haul for the winery yet. There were 10 medals total awarded through two respected wine competitions in May. 

At the NorthWest Wine Summit, an international competition held annually at Hood River, Oregon, Field Stone was awarded a gold medal, three silver medals and four bronze medals to add to its previous honours.

This year’s gold medal went to the Raspberry Fruit Wine. In addition, the Cherry Fruit Wine, Strawberry-Rhubarb Fruit Wine and Strawberry Dessert Wine took home Silver Medals, and Bronze was awarded to the Bumbleberry Fruit Wine, Black Currant Fruit Wine, Wild Black Cherry Dessert Wine and Black Currant Dessert Wine.

At the NorthWest Wine Summit Competition, which includes wines produced in the Pacific Northwest region, more than 2000 wines were judged over a period of three days. Wineries from British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska were represented. 

At the other end of the continent, Canada’s own “All-Canadian Wine Championships” announced a Silver Medal for Field Stone’s Strawberry Dessert Wine and a Bronze Medal for its Strawberry-Rhubarb Fruit Wine.

The average price for the table wines is $18 to $19, whereas the dessert wines range in price from $18 to $25. 

The wines can be best found at farmer’s markets, including Strathmore’s own of course. Year-round shopping can be found at the Kingsland Farmers Market and Calgary Farmers Market in Calgary.

All wines are also available directly from Field Stone Winery at Strathmore from May to September, and all wines can be purchased on-line at www.fieldstonefruitwines.com.