George and Trudy Heiss's memoir could be the wine book of the year

Photo: Cover of the Heiss memoir

The most entertaining wine book I have read in some time is George and Trudy Heiss’s memoir: Decanting Memories: Our Life in the Vineyard, the Cellar & Beyond. Pioneers in the Okanagan wine industry, they were the founders of Gray Monk Estate Winery which opened in 1982. They ran it until they retired in 2017 after selling the winery to Peller Estates. George died in 2021 but the book is structured to leave the impression that both he and Trudy are narrating the story. And what a story it is!

The book was released recently at the winery but should also be available from the publisher, Figure.1, a Vancouver house with an eclectic range of titles. Handsomely put together, the book sells for about $35. The Heisses were both European-trained hairdressers who, after immigrating to Canada, had established successful businesses in Edmonton. Trudy’s father, who had an orchard and vineyard in what is now Lake Country, led them to switch careers and also grow grapes. They knew nothing about wine except, as George liked to say, how to get it out of a bottle.

“Over the years,” Trudy narrates, “people asked us, ‘How did you plan this?’ We didn’t plan anything. It evolved every year, just another step and lots of mistakes. … The romance of starting a vineyard lasted about five days. After that, it was just damned hard work.” They had a small harvest in 1974, ramping up to a full crop by 1976. George continued to work as a hairdresser while Trudy quit that career because her legs were giving out. “So then I went farming,” she narrates.

At first, they planted hybrid varietals like everyone else. George later often proclaimed that Maréchal Foch vines were not imported from France but rather were deported. “It was the happiest day of my life when we pulled it all out,” George said. By reading German books on viticulture – there were no relevant English books available to them – they were able to switch to vinifera. “We were the first in Canada to plant Pinot Gris,” Trudy says. “We always felt that if we were going to take this thing forward and maybe one day have our own winery, we needed to have varieties in the ground that would produce quality and could compete with the rest of the world on the same liquor store shelves.” The fact that they were German speakers (George was Austrian, Trudy was born in Germany) was pivotal for the British Columbia industry. In 1976 they were visited by Dr. Helmut Becker, then the head of the Geisenheim Grape Breeding Institute in Germany. He was so impressed with the grape-growing potential of their vineyard and of the area that he offered them 34 varieties to test. The Heisses in turn offered them to the entire industry. The Becker project, as it came to be called, proved that properly-grown vinifera would thrive in the Okanagan.

George and Trudy were selling their grapes to a commercial winery which decided to put on a Vancouver tasting to show off the wines from vinifera grapes. Unfortunately, a winemaking error had mixed up grams and ounces, resulting in sulphuring some of the wine. The winemaker covered the error up by blending, thus erasing the varietal character the wines should have had. “We can do better than that,” Trudy remembers telling her husband. “And that’s what started all the trouble.”

They made 375 gallons of wine in 1980 and bottled with a hand filler and a hand corker. “There were no labels, just masking tape with the name of the grape variety written it,” Trudy writes. But the wines were better than the packaging. To get the permit to build a winery, they had to go to Victoria and meet with Vic Woodland, a senior civil servant in liquor control. Trudy had brought along a couple of those bottles, masking tape and all. After Woodland tasted the wine, he soon had all his staff in tasting with him. “So we got our plans signed off, introduced our wines to the liquor board, and away we went.” There was another Victoria meeting with government some years after that Trudy attended. The meeting was set for the Union Club, which was men only in those days. Her industry colleagues managed to smuggle Trudy into the club. She recites with pride that she was the first woman (aside from staff) in the club.

Money was very expensive in the early 1980s when the Gray Monk winery was being built. The Heisses, who were over-extended, opened a tasting room before the building was complete in 1982. “Even though it wasn’t finished we had to open because the bank wouldn’t give us any more money,” George recounts. Their battles with bureaucrats were legendary, perhaps because government had so little experience with the wine industry. Trudy says: “Like the old joke: ‘I’m from government and I’m here to help.’ Are you kidding me?!” One of the earliest was a battle over signs on the highway directing visitors to Gray Monk, which was five kilometers off the beaten path. An official in the local highways department had the signs removed several times. They eventually went to Victoria to appeal to a senior bureaucrat. “He told us he wasn’t in the business of advertising our winery,” Trudy recounted.

On one occasion, inspectors ordered them to destroy 50,000 Riesling plants that had come from a European nursery because there was some soil on the roots. Instead, the Heisses spent two weeks scrubbing the roots of those vines. “We were there for a week, scrubbing the roots of fifty thousand Riesling plants with a potato brush,” George recounts. “And the thing was, the Riesling wasn’t even ours.” The plants were destined for other growers. The Heisses cleaned them because “we knew the industry needed the plants. When we first started, we pulled the whole industry along with us.”

In 1985, a hard freeze virtually wiped out the vinifera crop. Gray Monk, which was virtually sold out, wanted to import grapes. Victoria said all the estate wineries would have to get behind such an initiative. But Gray Monk’s competitors, who still had inventory to sell, refused. “From that day forward, we never worked to help the industry again,” Trudy writes.

I am not sure that is entirely true. Gray Monk lifted the entire industry by making superb wines, by supporting the introduction of the VQA program and by turning the winery into a destination winery. And as they ended their career, the industry honoured them with a major award. The above photo is of them accepting the award; and well deserved it was.