Opportunities Grow Along with the BC Wine Industry

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The wine industry is hiring and there are new opportunities for talented professionals. What does it take to get a job in BC's wine industry? In this issue we talk to Lisa Janzen, the vineyard manager at the award-winning Spearhead Winery.

Vineyard work is difficult and highly specialized, and plays an essential role in the wine production process. However, it is an aspect of the craft which often receives significantly less attention than the industry’s other branches.

Lisa Janzen is a young and talented professional working on the vineyard side of the Okanagan wine industry, and she describes her work as an important, though often overlooked, element of the winemaking process.

“We’re not seen as much as the rest of the industry, yet there’s a huge amount of science and a huge amount of physical work that goes into it, and the people in the industry doing it well are incredibly passionate and work really hard – it’s not an easy job,” she explains.

Janzen is the vineyard manager at Spearhead Winery in East Kelowna, where she oversees the growth and production of grapes used in the winemaking process. Her work is physically demanding and highly varied, ranging from administrative tasks to hands-on work in the field and public relations at professional industry conferences. It is a highly specialized role which represents an essential element of quality wine production – on top of meeting the physical demands of the harvest, a vineyard manager must be well-versed in the science of viticulture, which means having an extensive knowledge of different grape varietals and the unique ways in which they respond to fluctuating weather conditions in the Okanagan. For Janzen, it is this scientific element of her work in the vineyard which most inspires her passion for the craft.

“I love working with the vines. I’ve always loved working with plants, shaping them and seeing what they’re doing and how different areas respond to different conditions,” she remarks. “I do love the science of viticulture – I also love making wine and I love the technicality that goes into a wine and learning about it.”

Janzen has been honing this passion for wine and food from an early age, which she attributes to her family’s history in the industry. Her father, David Janzen, has worked in the restaurant industry for most of his life, and this year marked his twenty-fifth season at the Harvest Golf Club, also in East Kelowna, where he fills the role of head banquet server.

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The harvest

Photo by Gary Symons

The harvest

Harvesting grapes at Spearhead Winery.

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Spearhead harvest

Spearhead harvest

The Spearhead team at work during the harvest.

“Being around people my Dad worked with from a young age, I was surrounded by sommeliers and chefs who spent years developing a craft and producing wine and food,” Janzen explains. “I got to meet them and ask them questions, and they loved teaching me probably because I was so enthusiastic.”

Janzen began her career in food and wine in the service industry, working with her father at the Harvest as a server and bartender. Entering the restaurant industry brought her into close contact with chefs and wine producers, whose expertise she absorbed and channeled into her passion for the craft of food and wine. She went on to work at Waterfront wines followed by a restaurant in Vancouver, all the time developing her knowledge of the industry. But while working in service, Janzen suffered a major setback when she injured her knee, an event which almost ended her career in food and wine.

“I started working in an office and tried to accept that that was what I had to do from now on,” Janzen recalls.

However, Janzen soon became restless in the office environment, and her passion for food and wine ultimately overcame her hesitation at working a physical job with her injury. She applied for the Viticulture Technology Program at Okanagan College in Penticton, and after a year of training in the science of wine, she began her practicum working in the vineyard at Spearhead Winery in 2013. Janzen quickly proved to be driven and skilled in the vineyard, and over the following years she took on increasing responsibilities, ultimately becoming vineyard manager in 2018 just five years after beginning her career in viticulture.

Though still a small winery, Spearhead has grown substantially since Janzen began her work in the vineyard, and she has played an important role in shaping the development of the vineyard and its wine production.

“I feel that the business and I have had matching growth and ambitions, so every time I feel myself getting a bit bored, it grows with me,” Janzen says. “I started at Spearhead when it was quite a bit smaller, and since then we’ve planted the whole other half of the vineyard, which I have ran.”

Spearhead Winery is particularly known for its Pinot Noirs, a distinction which may be traced back to the company’s winemaker, Grant Stanley, who has a passion for the varietal that stems from his history training as a winemaker in New Zealand. Pinot Noir is a notoriously challenging wine to produce, and Janzen notes that this is one element of her work at Spearhead that keeps her job interesting.

“There’s so much to the Pinot varietal that you never really get bored of it. It can be temperamental, it molds easily and it challenges you,” she explains. “You have to be a good grower so every year there’s something I look to improve. It shows me my flaws, so I’m always able to grow more with it. You’re never complacent with Pinot.”

While the winery is famous for its Pinots, it was Spearhead’s 2018 Riesling which won the award for Wine of the Year in 2019. Riesling is Janzen’s favorite varietal, and she is very proud of Spearhead’s award-winning wine, which is a high-acidity Riesling that has slightly more residual sugar than what would typically come out of a cold-climate property such as Spearhead. With its acidity spike and residual sweetness, the 2018 Riesling is a balanced and complex wine that Janzen says the winery will continue to experiment with in the coming season.

This Wine of the Year award appears as only one of a number of markers of the significant success and growth Spearhead has enjoyed in the years since Janzen first began her work in the vineyard, success which she attributes to the calibre of the winery’s team.

“Everyone from top to bottom understands that the top thing is quality wine,” she says. “They appreciate how much work we do in the vineyard and that it’s not about pomp and circumstance, it’s about putting out a really good quality wine and having fun doing it.”

For Janzen, an important element of her team’s dynamic at Spearhead is the recognition she and her crew receive for the work they do in the vineyard, which is often overlooked by those in the industry. Grant Stanley is known for recognizing his vineyard workers and growers whenever he has won awards for his wines, and Janzen considers this appreciation to be an important quality of the team at Spearhead that is not necessarily shared by the industry as a whole.

“We do a ton of work, we spend a lot of time with our fruit but no one is as interested in talking about the work we do, we’re kind of just seen as the dirty farmers on the side,” she observes. “I think the industry as a whole could work towards recognizing that there are three parts to the wine industry and we all need each other. Grant and my company are great at recognizing that, which is another reason I love working there.”

However, despite Janzen’s clear enthusiasm for her company and her ongoing passion for her craft, she does encounter significant obstacles as a female vineyard manager in a largely male-dominated field. To a greater degree than the other branches of the industry, vineyard work is populated by male farmers and contractors who are often unused to encountering women in the field, particularly women in positions of authority. Janzen describes this as an ongoing problem in the industry that she has encountered frequently throughout her career.

“There is often people who come on site who will just not recognize me for my position because I’m female. I fight that stigma a lot,” she says. “I’ve had people go to all the male workers first because they won’t expect me to have any authority, I’ve had people laugh in my face for driving a tractor, and there are incidents where people know I’m the boss but refuse to act like I am. It gets frustrating after a while.”

Janzen notes that the culture is changing, and the team at Spearhead Winery set a positive example in the way they confront the stigma surrounding women in the vineyard. Her team recognizes her authority and expertise in the field and are quick to defend her when she encounters any discrimination from outside farmers that come on site, many of whom are merely unused to seeing a woman in such a role. More and more women are beginning to enter viticulture however, following the example set by prominent female professionals in the field such as Janzen, and the industry has been slowly adapting to these changes.

Despite the obstacles Janzen continues to face as a young woman in the vineyard industry, her knowledge of viticulture and her passion for food and wine has distinguished her as a talented professional in the rapidly growing Okanagan wine industry. She describes this industry itself as an important part of what continues to draw her to her work in viticulture.

“Although there are many divisions in the wine industry, there is also a lot of comradery – we all want to be on the map, we all want to compete with California and South Africa and Europe,” she explains. “The Okanagan is an amazing region, Pinot grows well here, which is rare, Chardonnay does well here, big beautiful historic varietals do amazing here and there are a lot of passionate people who want to put our stamp on those varietals, so it’s cool to be part of an industry that is working to create a legacy. It makes you feel like you are part of something much bigger.”

Janzen plans to continue her work as vineyard manager at Spearhead in the coming season, and further develop on her knowledge as a grower in the Okanagan region. It seems certain that we can expect to see more great things coming out of the winery as they continue to develop their property and their craft in Okanagan winemaking.