Jason Parkes
Jason Parkes at the new Crown & Thieves winery in West Kelowna.
Anyone who has opened a winery, guided it through the painful early years, and turned it into a lasting success will tell you there’s a lot more to creating a popular winery than just making great wine. That’s especially true in British Columbia, where the vast majority of businesses are smaller estate wineries that rely on farmgate purchases for most of their revenue.
With that in mind, we spoke to Jason Parkes, a wine maker who came to the business with absolutely nothing, and now runs three wineries, a cidery, and is planning the opening of a micro-brewery.
All of it is hard to imagine, given Parkes’ history as a completely broke rock musician whose van broke down on the side of the road in the Okanagan Valley.
“We were playing in bands and chasing dreams, and there’s a cost to that,” Parkes says philosophically today. “That was not an easy life to say the least.
“Getting into wine, what happened was our bus broke down and I had to make some money to keep it going, so I went to a little winery in Peachland (Hainle), and incredibly, they hired me. It was supposed to be a part-time thing, just in and out, but at that point my wife was getting pretty sick of me being a broke rock and roll wannabe, out there chasing the dream.
“But, these people, I owe them the world, because they turned me into a winemaker in a very, very short time.”
Parkes was not formally educated, and in fact, describes himself as a “Grade 10 dropout who never read a book,” but it turned out he was not only a natural winemaker, but also brilliant at the business of running a winery.
Through his company Jason Parkes Customs, Parkes has almost become a wine trail in his own right, and he did so by following the most unconventional path one can imagine. Today, JPC owns The Hatch, The Black Swift, the Truck 59 Cidery, the Screaming Frenzy wine brand, the Crown & Thieves, and plans on building a micro-brewery.
After working primarily as a wine consultant with various other businesses, Parkes launched The Hatch in West Kelowna, and did it in his usual unconventional fashion.
“At that point I wasn’t the owner, I was just consulting and part of the whole thing,” Parkes recalls. “It was supposed to be a big, Quail’s Gate kind of thing on that Hatch property, which is of course a beautiful building, but we couldn’t do it because we needed road permits that we didn’t have.
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Crown & Theives Winery
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Crown & Thieves View
“So, I said, can we take the old sheds down there, give me a budget to renovate them, and we’ll just do that until we get the road improvements?”
The sheds were basically old ruins, half falling over, but incredibly, Parkes and his wine crew got it done, starting with the front door. “First we got it stable, then we went to Vancouver and we found this old door that gave us the color palate for the whole thing.” A buddy took over much of the design work, turning the main shed into a rustic, funky building filled with fascinating antiques … and when that front door opened, business boomed.
“That little garage that cost $500,000 for that whole thing, the first month it was open it cleared $300,000,” he said. “So, anyone out there wanting to do a winery, the thing I would say is, it’s not always what you spend. It’s putting the thought into it, and not being scared to be unique and different.”
In a sense, The Hatch and now the Crown & Thieves are the ‘anti-winery’. They’re spaces where guests can come and hang out, like old jeans that look a bit worn but comfortable, filled with interesting bits of history, and the wine is there as part of the experience.
Parkes believes many people find wine daunting, and a big part of his story telling is designed to demystify the product, and make it okay to like whatever you want.
“Wine is a very intelligent topic, for sure, and because no one can really know everything there is to know about wine, it can be a bit intimidating too,” Parkes says. “My whole thing is to create places that give comfort to people, to really downplay it, and get people comfortable with the wine experience.
“I’ve got this stupid saying, that’s right on the box there, saying, ‘Wine is just yeast poop’, and often I will call it rotten grape juice. Ideally I want people to come off the ledge so they’re open to trying things, and there’s no advance expectation of what their own wine experience should be.”
But the Hatch did more than just act as a business; it also became the incubator for subsequent ventures.
“So yeah, the concept was that this place is going to grow brands and grow products,” Parkes explains. “You saw that Black Swift started there, and it got stable, it got known, it got traction, and then it was built as a new winery. Same with Crown & Thieves. It was incubated at The Hatch, it got traction and it got built.”
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Crwon & Thieves Tasting Bar
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Crwon & Thieves Ceiling
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Crwon & Thieves Interior
One of the surprising things about the JPC wineries is how different each one is. The Hatch is rustic and funky, the Black Swift more elegant and modern, and Crown & Thieves is just downright eccentric, a transplant of aging European charm dropped directly into the Okanagan Valley.
JPC’s most recent venture is Crown & Thieves just outside the West Kelowna downtown district, and next door to the Truck 59 cidery they also own. If there’s a winery that reflects Parkes’ irreverent, punk rock attitude toward the wine business, it’s Crown & Thieves.
Not yet fully constructed, the building looks like the battered ruin of an ancient building you might see in a French medieval village, the masonry designed to look like it’s crumbling into history. The inside is even more unusual. The tasting room is a cross between British pub and French bistro, with every corner stuffed with unusual antiques, portraits of gangsters lining the walls, a wildly exuberant mural on the ceiling, and downstairs a rough looking ‘Speakeasy’ with a stage where Parkes and his punk band Proper Man regularly play for their fans.
It definitely doesn’t look like a winery … and yet, it all works. The winery is regularly packed to its COVID-19 capacity, the wine club is selling out quickly, and the wine is in high demand.
“It started with the bottle,” Parkes says. “I wanted to do something that was very classically French, but unique with our own punk rock spirit in it, so the label happened first and that led to everything else.”
That everything else turned into a global jumble sale. Parkes hired Kimberly Fuller as architect from Lake Monster Studios and Chris Nagy from Bronag Contracting as the builder, and then went on the hunt for unique pieces in salvage yards, antique shops and even from neighbours. A gigantic wooden confessional from Ireland came from a friend. Another piece came from another winery that wanted some help on their latest vintage and was willing to trade. Another antique came from an old speakeasy in San Francisco, a lamp appeared from New York, and other items showed up from ancient hotels in England and Wales.
“I was a complete pain in the a- -,” Parkes admits. “Everything was constantly changing. Colors are changing, moving this, put this there, buying something that’s going to be a bar but then it turns into a door, and then the door turns into something on the ceiling. I just bought all these crazy pieces and played Tetris, and because I was with such great people that respected me enough to follow my lead, it was painful, but it was beautiful, a beautiful experience for everyone to watch it being put together.”
Through some miracle, that haphazard yet organic approach to design really works for Crown & Thieves, but Parkes says design or even the quality of wine are not the most important thing when it comes to building a successful wine business. Rather, it’s the people you have around you, and how you interact with others in the industry.
“The biggest part of any business is the people, so putting the time into our crew, building up the energy and getting our people to the point we can support this growth is the priority, even before putting up the buildings,” Parkes says. “Y’know, you may have the ideas, but ideas are pretty easy. It’s execution that’s hard, and it’s all about seeing it through and having the people there who can be part of it with you. You can’t think about where you’re going to be tomorrow; you have to think about where you’ll be years down the road, to have a focus and a purpose.”
Parkes also says karma plays a big part in business success. Just as the Hainle Vineyard gave him a hand up, Parkes says helping others will also help you when you hit a rough patch.
“If you want to build your business, then be there to help other people in that same business,” he argues. “That’s what I did, and the path took care of me, because once I started helping other people, well, other people started helping me.”