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Price 10.97 - 80.goo Reebok Runners 469% Spring Bulb Selectio } March 9, 1988 C1 By MICHAEL BERNARD Canadian Press KELOWNA (CP) — George heiss takes a humble view of winemaking: it is the grape, not the man, that makes the wine. “I think there is too much made of the mystique of ing,” says the pl. king 25-year-old. “You can’t make a good wine out of a lousy grape.” The winemaker’s role, he says, is essentially to avoid making mistakes that get-im’Mother Nature's way. Heiss's attitude is not an accident. It comes from meeting some of Europe's greatest winemakers while he was apprenticing at the Guntrum Winery in Germany in 1980 and going to school at the Winemaker’s Institute in Weinsberg. Heiss's Gray Monk Cellars and the seven other estate wineries in British Columbia have put the Okanagan Valley on the map as more than a fruit-growing area. Okanagan wines are considered by experts to rank respectably with some “of Germany's quality Kabinett wines. PRICED TO SELL Perhaps more importantly, the price is right. Most B.C. estate wines sell for $4.50 to $8 a bottle, while similar German wines run $10 to $12. Local wines are popular with B.C. drinkers, who consume aboiut twice as much B.C. wine as imported brands, provincial Liquor Administration Branch figures show. Estate wineries account for only about two per cent of the total 21 million litres produced annually by the province's wine industry, led by the commercial leaders Calona and Casabello. But the estate operations have seen their sales and markets grow steadily. Gray Monk, the largest estate winery, is set amid 10 hectares of vineyards lining the east bank of Okanagan Lake. The concrete-block building has been expanding since Gray Monk, owned by the Heiss family, produced its first wine in 1982. It now turns out 11 wines — nine whites, a rose anda red from European variety grapes. The whites range from the light and delicate Pinot Auxerois and German-style dry white Johannisberg Reisling to a spicy Gewurztraminer and the full-bodied Estate wineries put é. Okanagan on map Pinot Gris. The winery produced more than 186,000 bottles last yéar, Now it has a wine store on the second floor where visitors can taste samples or buy bottles. They can also pick up souvenirs, such as sweatshirts declaring: “Life is too short to drink bad wine.” DRAWS VISITORS Ona busy day — particularly when rain is drenching nearby beaches in this resort area — more than 500 people will pass through the winery to look at what is a deceptively simple process. The wine press on the ground floor crushes up to 200 tonnes of grapes hand-picked from the adjoining vineyard. The juice is piped into towering 10-metre stainless steel tanks in temperature-controlled rooms, where it is allowed to ferment for eight days. Cleanliness and temperature are critical, says Heiss. Foreign substances can wreak havoc with fermentation while temperature will affect the critical speed at which the yeast converts the juice into alcohol. Specialty winemaking in British Columbia has never been an easy business. Heiss and other estate vintners quickly acknowledge they would not exist except for provincial legislation introduced in the 1970s. The law — unique in Canada — sets certain conditions for cottage wineries: they must be located on their own vineyards, use their own grapes and produce a maximum of 136,000 litres of wine a year. Cottage wineries elsewhere in Canada — there are about 10 in Ontario and two in Nova Scotia — are not restricted to using only their own grapes. MARKUP LOW The B.C. estate wineries also get a price break on the liquor store shelves: their wine is marked up only 15 per cent above wholesale cost, compared with 50 per cent for domestic commercial wines and 110 per cent for all imports. Earlier this year, however, that preferential system was found to be in violation of international trading rules. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade said the markups give B.C. wineries an unfair advantage. If the preferential system is abolished, Heiss and other B.C. estate vintners say they could be wiped out by European competitors. And-like every farming operation, weather is a WINEMAKING _. - , * - ¥ _ HARVEST TIME . . . Kelowna grapegrower Doug Sperling handpicks grapes. paramount concern. Grapes grown in the Okanagan take 8 couple of weeks longer to ripen than in Europe and an early frost can kill hundreds of vines that need four years to reach maturity. “Winter damage is very hard to control,” says Heiss. “We expect to lose about one out of every 10 plants (annually) that way.” CONCORD HARDY British Columbia's early winemakers overcame the problem of winter damage by using the durable North American Labrusea or Concord grape, which stands up well to the Okanagan's cold winters. But that hardy grape produced a red wine that left something to be desired in taste and its rancid smell reminded one writer “of an old wet buffalo fur coat.” In the early 1980s, grape growers, confronted with a oe ad ae CosNews Proto consumer move to white wines from red, were forced to rip out red-wine variety grapes and replace them with white varieties, such as Reisling an@°Pinot Gris. Bernard Hoeter, wine columnist for the Vancouver Sun, credits Heiss with introducing viniferas — purebed European grape varieties — to the Okanagan Valley. However, the Okanagan's growing season is shorter than for U.S. and European vineyards and that limits the amount of sugar in the wine as well as the balance of acids, So the search continues for a new variety of grape that will thrive in the shorter growing season, the way durum wheat did on the Prairies. “Wheat was not a great thing in Canada, until they found durum (wheat), says Hoeter. “And now the Prairies are the bread basket of North America.” THE FED'S NEW IMAGE Wolo WANETA PLAZA TRAIL, B.C. STORE HOURS: Monday to Saturday 9:30-5:30 Thursday and Friday 9:30-9:00 PRICE IS ONLY THE BEGINNING The grooming of labor By GRACE MACALUSO Canadian Press Blinded by the hot glare of camera lights, Ken Georgetti, president of the British Columbia Federation of Labor, reluctantly took his place in a Vancouver television studio. “Action!” yelled the director, and an assertive Georgetti ripped into the provincial government's latest “union- busting” legislation. It took three takes to finish the TV commercial, the labor leader recalled later, and “the whole experience was stressful and very embarrassing. “But I had to do i Georgetti is among a growing number of labor leaders turning to radio and television as unions adopt public-re- lations tactics used by their opponents in government and the corporate world. “We have to communicate effectively, and if we don't we're going to die,” says Derik Hodgson, communications director for the Canadian Labor Congress, which has two million members. IMAGE NEGATIVE Unions are struggling with a negative public image which some leaders blame partly on what they call a pro-business news media. “It's not newsworthy that more than 90 per cent of negotiations in Canada result in settlements,” complains Gord Wilson, president of the Ontario Federation of Labor. “People believe unions are always on strike.” Some unions have had a rough time of it lately. Federal back-to-work legislation ended unpopular strikes last year by inside postal workers and letter carriers. On the other hand, the recent nurses’ strike in Alberta seems to have drawn support from the public, judging from letters to Alberta newspapers. The labor movement has to bear part of the blame for its image, says Alan Pryde, communications director of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents 180,000 federal government workers. “One of the difficulties is that public relations in the past didn’t have a high priority (for unions),” Pryde says. FACE MEDIA Hodgson says the news media was traditionally viewed as the enemy, but the days are gone when a national labor leader could avoid journalists. “We've become more cognizant of television as the wave of the future,” he says. “We try to tailor events so they KEN GEORGETTI - 'stresstul’, ‘embarrassing’ would become more appealing to television. That's a page from tit corporate book.” Electronic news releases, with taped messages from congress president Shirley Carr, are finding their way into radio stations across Canada. In December, the congress sent out taped statements on Carr's stand against free trade to 122 radio newsrooms. Some labor leaders undergo “media training” by advertising agencies such as Michael Morgan and Associates, a Vancouver-based firm which deals solely with labor groups. “We'll dress them up and boil down information to a comfortable message,” says Morgan about the leader training program. “They're reluctant at first. They don't want to put a polish orshine on themselves. But dealing with the press is like learning a dance and they have to know the steps.” Training includes a mock news conference where labor leaders are “grilled on specific points.” Georgetti swears by the Procedure and he has encouraged his colleagues to try it. “We were able to identify what habits I might have had that didn’t look good on TV,” he says. Opinion polls, used extensively by political parties, are gaining more acceptance within the labor movement, says Pryde. “One of the more difficult challenges unions face is to win the hearts and minds of their own members,” he says. “We know what the activists want, but what about the average member who doesn't always speak out?” CONDUCTS POLLS The B.C. Federation of Labor does regular polling to. help develop advertising campaigns and “find out what the Public is thinking about various issues,” says spokesman Tom Fawkes. “Unions can't do without us,” says Morgan, whose firm has developed campaigns for the federation. “The government has millions of dollars to Promote themselves and can call a news conference at any time.” A $110,000 campaign, which included opinion polls and television commercials, is credited with helping the Telephone Workers Union win its battle against a 1984 bid by CNCP Telecommunications to sell long-distance services in British Columbia, says Paul Hovan, general manager of Morgan. Television ads told the public the move would hurt Provincially owned B.C. Tel's ability to subsidize services in rural areas and would lead to higher residential rates and complicated telephone bills. CNCP LOST BID Opposition to the move increased as the campaign brought together consumer groups and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, which also own their telephone systems. The Canadian Radio-tel Tek Commission eventually turned down CNCP's application. “We've gone beyond the era of ideas into an era of impressions,” says Pryde. Ideas have to be packaged in such a way that they leave a favorable impression on the public, which doesn't have time for statistics and is steadily turning away from the print media. “We can't try to outspend corporations and govern- ments but we can be smarter with our spending.” FORMER DJ BEHIND NEW LABOR ADS By GRACE MACALUSO Michael Morgan was on picket duty outside a strike- bound Vancouver radio station when an elderly woman, with a fiendish grin, took him aside and asked, “So what did you do with Jimmy Hoffa?” “It was at that point that I realized the labor movement needed good public relations,” Morgan says as he recounts the 1974 incident. The 87-year-old former dise jockey is president of Michael Morgan and Associates — a Vancouver-based advertising agenty which deals solely with labor groups. “I won't take business clients because it could result in a conflict of interest,” Morgan said in a telephone interview. The agency has about 30 clients, including the British Columbia Federation of Labor and the Canadian Labor Congress. It is also “the agency of record for the federal New Democratic Party,” says Morgan. SAVED NDP? The firm's NDP ad campaign in the 1984 federal election saved the party from virtual extinction in the Conservative sweep, claims Morgan. “Some people were predicting that the New Democrats would be reduced to eight seats, but we managed to hang on to 30 of 82 seats.” The Morgan firm has grown significantly since it was started in 1978. Its first year of operation generated sales totalling $50,000, and Morgan projects sales will reach $5 million at the end of 1988. The style of labor advertising has changed from being “very blunt and confrontational” to “aggressively entertaining,” says Morgan. “One of things we pioneered was comedy in ads. We no longer show our anger on the air.” HELP TEACHERS The firm helped the B.C. Teachers Federation fight Provincial legislation last year which made it no longer mandatory for teachers to join the organization. “We launched a TV ad campaign which showed teachers doing their jobs and being appreciated by students and parents,” Morgan says.