Foxtrot Winery emerges from receivership

Mike Boyd, new owner of Foxtrot

Foxtrot Vineyards, the storied Pinot Noir producer on the Naramata Bench, is emerging from receivership under the new ownership of Mike Boyd, the proprietor of Therapy Vineyards and its associated winery, Silhouette Cellars. The court documents filed by receiver PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc. reveal that Foxtrot has not made money since 2019, the year after Foxtrot founder Torsten Allander sold the winery to Douglas Barzelay, a New York based expert on Burgundy, and his partner, Nathan Todd (pictured below). “As the original owner and creator of Foxtrot winery and brand, I in retrospect deeply regret my sale of the winery to the Americans,” Torsten wrote in a recent Facebook post. “I realized very early that the knowledge to produce a good wine and manage a winery operation was not evident.”

Photo: Douglas Barzelay (left) and Nathan Todd

The court filings show that, at the beginning of December 2024, Foxtrot had liabilities of $11,130,388 ($2,933,199 secured and $8,191,189 unsecured) against assets of $3,971,324. The unsecured creditors include a number of consulting and winery support business in the Okanagan. According to the court filings, the winery operations had “largely shut down” by the fall of 2023 and the winery stopped paying its obligations to CIBC Bank. The winery’s owners blamed the ongoing losses to “issues in the winemaking process in 2019 and 2020 which significantly reduced revenue. Revenues were not sufficient to cover operating expenses, and no income was available to service the Companies’ debts to CIBC.”

Foxtrot was conceived after Torsten (pictured below) a Swedish-born pulp and paper engineer, retired in 2002 to a 1.4-hectare (3½-acre) property on Naramata Road that was planted entirely with Clone 115 Pinot Noir. Two years later, Torsten arranged to have the nearby Lake Breeze winery make wine with the grapes, in a trial that spanned three vintages. Convinced that the vineyard could produce world-class Pinot Noir, Torsten built a modest winery and planted two adjoining vineyards to triple Foxtrot’s size.

Douglas Barzelay, a retired New York lawyer, first encountered Foxtrot Pinot Noir at a tasting in Vancouver. He was so impressed with the quality that, with Nathan Todd, his Alberta-born partner, he bought a peach orchard near the Foxtrot property, intending to plant more Pinot Noir. When they discovered that Foxtrot was for sale, the partners bought the winery with ambitious plans to expand it. Douglas is an authority on, and collector of, Burgundy wines. He is co-author of Burgundy Vintages: A History from 1845, published in 2018. He was also an expert witness at the trial of Burgundy counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan.

It did not take too long for Torsten to become disillusioned with Foxtrot’s new owners. On Facebook, he writes: “The closing date for the business transfer was missed by the purchasers and delayed quite some time which gave me time to understand their thoughts on managing the winery. I came to the conclusion that I did not wish to proceed with the sale after six months and notified the purchasers but with no success as they refused to annul the contract of sale. It was a sad day when I finally handed over the winery and since that time the new owners never spoke to me nor did they seek any advice how to run the winery and winemaking and marketing. I never contacted them myself either.”

Torsten added that he wishes only success for Mike Boyd. “I know the vineyards can produce an excellent fruit and with a masterful winemaking, an outstanding wine can be produced again for Pinot lovers to enjoy.” Mike Boyd and Jacqueline Johnson, his wife, entered the Okanagan wine business in 2016. For the previous 22 years, they had run a successful oil and gas business in Alberta until they sold it to a larger competitor. That gave Mike the resources to fulfil a longtime ambition to get into wine. After another bidder topped his bid for Mt. Boucherie Estate Winery, which was then in receivership, he and Jacqueline purchased Therapy Vineyards and Inn on Naramata Road. They had also purchased a nearby vineyard property for what has become Silhouette Cellars, a sparkling wine project now based in The District Wine Village. Silhouette was used as the vehicle to purchase Foxtrot.