Little Farm Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

The first winter nearly finished it. Rhys Pender and Alishan Driediger bought five acres at Cawston in 2008, with a run-down century-old house and a single mulberry tree, and sold their bakery in Kelowna to make wine. In 2009 they planted four acres of Chardonnay and Riesling. That winter was a harsh one, and Pender estimates 70 per cent of the vines died. They replanted over the next three years.

Cawston is in the Similkameen Valley, just west of the Okanagan and much quieter. Pender, now a Master of Wine, has pointed out that its wineries see only a fraction of the Okanagan’s visitors. He chose white grapes for the soils, which are rich in calcium carbonate and, in his view, give “a great acidity and stony oyster shell minerality” to the wines. The grapes are picked early to keep that acidity, and the wine writer Jamie Goode found the Chardonnay “pretty Chablis like”. That means lean, bright and stony rather than rich and buttery.

The first vintage, 2011, came to 56 cases, and Pender has said Little Farm will never make more than 1,000. The wines are made slowly and simply: wild yeast, old neutral barrels, time on the lees, and for the Pied de Cuve series no fining or filtering and only a low dose of sulphur. The vineyard takes its name, Mulberry Tree, from the single mulberry tree that came with the land, and it has been farmed organically since it was planted.

One limit on the certificate is worth knowing. PACS certifies the estate’s Chardonnay and Riesling under BCCOP, British Columbia’s own organic programme, which allows an organic claim only for sale inside the province. It is not a Canada Organic Regime certificate, and it covers the grapes rather than the winery. Little Farm’s Cabernet Franc comes from other growers’ vineyards, which the certificate does not cover.