A rare vintage

An ancient blend gets a modern spin

Richard Karlo was a wine visionary. He courted his wife-to-be, Sherry, by bringing her to the County in his search for the perfect vineyard. He wanted Hillier limestone, south-facing slopes, a water feature and, the clincher, a hip-roofed barn. Those elements came together in what is now Karlo Estates, just north of Wellington. From the beginning, Richard looked towards the future, seeking innovative ways to grow grapes and expand the business, all the while maintaining the highest possible standards. He was among the first to tiledrain his fields, which helped to mitigate the problem of grape mildew. Looking to the future, and with a nod to the past, he also planted an acre of carménère grapes, a varietal thought to have gone extinct in the 1860s after a devastating outbreak of phylloxera destroyed most of the vineyards in France. Fortunately, this grape was discovered thriving in Chile in the 1990s, and has been reintroduced on disease-resistant rootstock. Richard had a vision of recreating a Bordeaux blend from the six classic red varietals—cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, petit verdot and carménère—something that has rarely been done since the 1860s.

Sherry Karlo holds a prototype bottle for the new Sextus Bordeaux blend to be released in late-2020, while Saxe Brickenden (rear) holds a bottle of the current Quintus.

Over the years, Karlo Estates has created a blend of three reds, their Triumvirate, and occasionally a blend of five reds, their Quintus, but until this past season they have not had enough of the carménère to create what Richard called “the Holy Grail” of wines. Sadly, Richard died in 2014, but his vision has been brought to fruition by Sherry, together with Saxe Brickenden and winemakers Derek Barnett and Spencer Mayer. “We have all the components aging in separate barrels, and in August next year [2020] we will be doing bench trials and figuring out what the right ratio is to make that perfect Bordeaux blend, where you’re using each varietal to fill in the holes of the next for the longest taste profile, and for balance and texture, to make the best wine that you can,” said Sherry. “This is how the monks believed wine should be made, way back in the 1800s, so we’re trying to recreate that. In over a hundred years it’s rarely been done, and certainly people wouldn’t have thought of Canada as a place where this would happen. It’s a lofty project and I’m so excited that we’re able to come to this point where we are now making it.”

The road to recreating this classic Bordeaux was made possible with the help of an Internet invention most often associated with the tech sector. In his previous career, Brickenden launched an Indiegogo fundraising project for a small company that raised a staggering $2.2 million from investors. It occurred to him that the winery could also take advantage of Indiegogo to raise some money. “Sherry’s been growing the business 10 to 15 per cent per annum for the last four or five years,” he said. “That means that today we need 30 per cent more inventory in barrels to hit our sales target in two years. It occurred to me that this would be a great way to fund our growth and that we could pre-sell our Sextus. There’s a whole lot of innovation at Karlo in winemaking, why not have a little innovation in marketing too?” He and his team created an Indiegogo campaign where backers could buy future bottles of Sextus, which would be shipped to them sometime in September 2020. It drew a lot of interest and they quickly surpassed their fundraising target. However, Indiegogo changed its terms of agreement and prohibited the shipping of alcohol, leading the team at Karlo to offer instead a voucher that allowed the pick-up of wine at the winery, rather than having it delivered. Even so, the project has raised over $30,000, and one of the perks—a dinner and wine-tasting—has been completely sold out. “The notion of selling futures in wine is known in the wine industry, but using a digital medium like Indiegogo has never been done before,” said Sherry. “So it’s kind of neat taking two things that don’t really belong together and have such an amazing success.” The money raised from this campaign will be used to buy materials such as geotextiles to protect the vines in winter, as well as for planting additional acreage so they can make more wine in the future. The Sextus blend is priced at $100 per bottle, and there will be enough inventory for only about 1,000 bottles. While the price may seem somewhat steep, this wine is a landmark in Canadian wine history as this blend has never before been achieved. In terms of an investment, a guide may be found in a previous vintage of Quintus that initially sold for $36 per bottle and can now be found on some wine lists for $1,000. There has been widespread interest in the new wine, with backers from the US and as far away as the UK. “We have buyers for this wine from outside the country coming here to pick it up,” said Sherry. “So it’s great for the County because we’re helping to drive some more tourism traffic.”

The new wine will be released in time for the winery’s 10-year anniversary. About one-third of the anticipated inventory is available on the Indiegogo site, with the remainder being sold through the winery, probably beginning in November 2020. “It’s a lot of hard work building a winery, and it’s very stressful from the financial standpoint,” said Sherry. “Making sure that Karlo Estates maintains an excellent reputation and is successful, and to see Richard’s dream live on, gives me a little piece of satisfaction for him. I hope it makes him smile. I’ve had so much help from people like Saxe and Derek and Spencer, even the whole community, to be able to see Richards dream come to fruition on time. It’s very, very gratifying. I don’t know if I can put into words how much it means to me.”

To view the Indiegogo campaign, please click here.