Photo: Harry von Wolff
When Harry von Wolff, Nanaimo’s pioneering winery owner,
died in 2005 at age 71, there was unfinished business at his Chateau Wolff
Estate Winery.
One item was completing a full roof over the winery’s
production building, which is just half covered. Harry had ordered a new roof
but it arrived shortly after his death. It was returned to the manufacturer.
Matt and Natalie Riga, the new owners who revived Chateau
Wolff in 2014, put on the new roof last summer. It was part of a renovation of
the production facility that included installing a temperature-controlled
barrel cellar. But they kept the gravity feed design designed by Harry to move
wine gently, without pumping.
They have, in fact, been careful at preserving the legacy of
Harry. They retained the name of the winery even though it had been closed
almost a decade when they bought it. They have researched both the history of
the property and Harry’s biography. Even though the brand was dormant, Harry’s
spirit lives on because he was such a larger-than-life figure.
He had been a member of an old family of landowners in
Latvia until World War 11. The Soviet occupiers of Latvia sent his father, who
had been a German officer, to a Siberian prison camp from which he was not
released until 1955.
The rest of the von Wolff family took refuge in Poland and
then postwar Germany. Harry, with his
mother and grandmother, immigrated to Canada in 1953. He worked on an
uncle's ranch in British Columbia 's Peace River country for a year and then began a
peripatetic career through fifty-eight different jobs over eleven years. A
hotel management course in Switzerland
led to a career in the hotel business that fostered his interest in wines. He
managed hotels in such locales as Haiti, the Queen Charlotte Islands and
Jasper.
In 1977, Harry and his wife, Helga, moved to Nanaimo and
another bewildering career change: he opened a shoe repair shop. Eventually,
that became the Island Boot and Saddle Shop, marketing western wear to the
equestrian set. Harry took to wearing black Stetsons and belts with wide silver
buckles.
He also became a competent amateur winemaker. After planting
a few vines at his home, Harry began looking for property at the outskirts of
Nanaimo for a vineyard. In 1987, he and Helga bought an eight-acre site. The
timber he harvested helped pay for the vineyard and to import vines from
France.
An admirer of the wines of Burgundy, he planted Pinot Noir
and a small block of Chardonnay in the best site, a southwest-facing slope
against a sunbathed cliff. “I love Pinot Noir and I don’t follow the general
line in North America that Pinot Noir is difficult,” Harry told me in a 1993
interview. “You’ve got to have the right site and the right microclimate. And
most of all, you don’t mess with it – keep it natural.”
He made his first commercial vintage in 1996 and opened the
winery in 1998. He expected to be making wine for a couple of decades. Sadly,
that was not to be.
After his death, his family and other winemakers continued to
grow and sell the grapes while try to sell the property. By the time Matt and
Natalie came along in 2013, the vineyard was in rough shape. Even so, the
mature vineyard, mostly planted in 1990, appealed to them. “Old vines produce less wine but they produce better
wine,” Matt says.
Matt was born in Trenton , Ontario , in 1981 while Natalie is from London , Ontario Victoria .
Natalie has a sociology degree from the University of Victoria. (Photo: Natalie and Matt with daughter Siena.)
They first came to Victoria
in 2007 to visit friends and fell in love with Vancouver
Island . “We decided we were going to stay there fulltime,” Natalie
says. Family reasons took them back to Trenton where, in 2010, they opened a
popular bistro. “We had been talking about a small restaurant in Victoria ,” Matt says.
“We both love cooking and everything that goes along with that.”
Wines goes with that. They were soon looking for winery
properties. They found that Chateau Wolff was for sale. It was the opportunity
they wanted to return to Vancouver Island late in 2013. Matt set about pruning
and rejuvenating the vineyard.
To make their first vintage in 2014, the couple recruited Mackenzie
Brisbois, a consulting winemaker from Prince Edward County in Ontario. “She
showed us the ropes in both the vineyard and the winery,” Matt says. “It worked
out really well. I had underestimated what goes into winemaking and tending to
a vineyard.
She returned to Ontario after that vintage, with Matt and
Natalie handling winemaking in subsequent vintages. They have learned well. The
wines are clean and fresh – perhaps one instance where Harry’s legacy is not
honoured. His Pinot Noir, for all that he kept it simple, was usually over-extracted,
probably because he punched down the cap so frequently during fermentation that
he actually got up at night to do it.
Here are notes on three current Chateau Wolff wines. The
best place to find them is in the tasting room. The tasting room also has a
very small release of Chardonnay and, soon, a 30-case release of a
bottle-fermented cider from the cider and heritage apple trees on the property.
Chateau Wolff Estate
Pinot Noir 2015 ($25 for 165 cases). A wine with a good colour, this begins
with aromas of cherries and plums. On the palate, the cherry flavours are
complimented with spicy oak from the nine months the wine aged in French oak.
The tannins are evolving nicely toward what Harry would have admired in a
Burgundy. 90.
Chateau Wolff Estate
Syrah 2015 ($25 for 185 cases). The grapes are from a small vineyard on the
Naramata Bench from which the winery also bought fruit for its 2016 vintage. The
wine aged in French oak for 12 months. The wine has a hint of white pepper in
the aroma, along with dark fruit, which is echoed on the palate. 90.
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