Kristin Wakal
THE GALLERY WINERY
Anyone who has started a winery knows just how tough a business it can be, and two sisters in the Okanagan Valley city of West Kelowna can certainly vouch for that.
Kirstin Wakal and Tasha Campbell are now the proud but slightly worn out owners of The Gallery Winery, which is also an art gallery and events facility.
But the sisters, who are so close they literally finish each other’s sentences, also said the process was a grind that left them doubting they’d ever succeed.
“It is so daunting,” said Tasha. “It was seven years of just really working hard, and you don’t get any wine out of it for the first three or four years, right? You’re just taking care of the grapes and nothing in return. So really, all you have is hope, and in the meantime you’re learning how the vineyard works and what to do.”
In fact, there came a point when the work was so hard, and the prospect of success so far away, that the decision to press on came down to a coin toss.
“Yeah, we were flipping a coin,” the sisters recalled. “Literally heads we do this, or tails we don’t, so yeah, we really almost quit. We were right on that fence, and we could have gone either way. I mean, it was like, what are we doing?
“It was a combination of all the challenges, and then just when you think you’ve made it and it’s going to work out, here comes another huge challenge. Opening a winery is almost like a video game where you’re fighting to get to the next level, and then you do it, and then it’s okay, next level, and next level after that.”
Fortunately for everyone who now gets to enjoy the Gallery’s wine, the sisters not only persevered but really triumphed by adopting mentors who helped them through the tough times, and helped develop some high quality Okanagan wines.
Tasha is an artist while Kirstin is a photographer, but the two more or less fell into the wine business after they decided to try to get farm status for an acreage their parents bought in 1980.
A wine consultant, Gary Strachan from Summerland, told them the site was ideal for wine grapes, as it boasts a sloping parcel with perfect southern exposure, and sits over the moderating influence of Okanagan Lake’s sparkling Gellatly Bay.
Garagistas
The vineyard was planted in 2015, and the sisters became “garagistas” with a small crop of grapes in 2017 which they used to learn winemaking basics.
So the two sisters waded in with bulldozers to clear the land in 2013, planted some Ehrenfelzer, Orange Muscat and what may be the most northerly stand of Malbec grapes, and started in as grapegrowers.
That venture was successful, and encouraged by Strachan, the sisters began to believe they could pull off opening a full estate winery.
“Gary kept encouraging us that we can do this and we would, and every week we would meet with Gary and we’d say we can do this right, Gary? And he would say yep, so we just kept going.”
Another mentor was Michael Bartier of Bartier Bros. Vineyard and Winery, a critically acclaimed winery in the Black Sage Bench region in Oliver.
Bartier was buying their grapes, and not only gave them good advice, but also helped them make their first vintages at his facility in Oliver. The trick, however, was how to get the wine to his winery.
“You’ve heard of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants?” jokes Kirstin. “Well, we’re the Sisters of the Traveling Tanks! We literally set off with our tanks down to Oliver and he made the wine for us in 2018 before we had our own winery set up.”
Once the winery was built, the sisters still had the problem of how to make their first vintage, and felt they really needed some more experienced help. That’s where their social game really came into play.
The family owned a massive armoire from a castle in Hungary, filled with ornate carvings. They had seen the new Crown & Thieves winery built by Jason Parkes, and they’d heard he was looking for unique antiques.
“I was like, that place looks like a castle, so I just DM’d him a picture of the armoire, and of course he was interested, so we made a little deal between friends,” Kirstin says. “He helped us make our wine, and now our armoire is sitting there in the Crown & Thieves!”
In return, that wine is now known as “Between Friends,” a reminder of the importance of winemakers helping each other when things threaten to go sideways.
The Gallery Winery had yet another dire adventure as the sisters prepared to make the first wine they crushed themselves, using a new crush ordered from Germany. It was at that point they learned all about the global logistics crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which threatened utter disaster.
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Planting
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Gallery Winery tasting room
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Winemaking
“The grapes are ripening, the heat dome has happened, and we’re all ready to go, but the press we ordered from Germany way back in the spring is still stuck on a cargo ship sitting outside Seattle,” the sisters recalled. “And we’re like, are you kidding me? It was what you might call a pressing issue!”
Luckily, the press arrived literally in the nick of time, and with help from friends who poured in to help pick the grapes in record time, the sisters successfully put out their best wine to date. True to form, they call the wine 11th Hour, “because it was literally the 11th hour to pick the grapes, and our winemaker came in at the 11th hour to help us make the wine.”
For anyone thinking of starting their own winery, the sisters say stubbornness is key, but so is looking for help from other winemakers and mentors in business. The Okanagan winemaking community is tight-knit and filled with people who are more than willing to help fellow winemakers.
That’s critical, Kirstin says, because there is a daunting amount to learn.
“There’s being a farmer, and you’re growing grapes, and then you’re making wine from those grapes, so that’s a different skill set,” she explains. “And then there’s the marketing and the selling of the product. So it’s actually like having three different businesses all wrapped in one, all interdependent on each other but all with different skill sets. So that’s what we were finding; that there was just so much to learn along the way.”
Despite all the hard work and the frequent crises, the sisters now say they are overjoyed they persevered and opened the winery, a light and airy space filled with beautiful arts and crafts and with a friendly, light-hearted vibe.
“It was hard, for sure, really hard,” they say. “Before all we could see in front of us was this huge hill we had to climb up, but now we’ve gotten to the top, the winery is open, and we can now look down and enjoy the view. I mean, we almost can’t believe we’ve actually done it, and wow, we own a winery!”
