A New Label and a New Start For Golden Mile Cellars

Golden Mile is the winery ensconced in a building resembling a small castle in Bavaria, with what looks like a knight in armour peering across the Okanagan Valley from the castle's parapet.

This eccentric building was designed and built by the winery's original owners, Peter and Helga Serwo. Veteran grape growers in the south Okanagan, they opened Golden Mile Cellars in 1998 when both were past retirement age. It was to become a family winery. However, a daughter who went to Europe to study winemaking decided to stay there.

Peter and Helga then put their winery on the market quietly, spending about a year and a half screening potential buyers until they found a couple to carry on their legacy. In December 2003, the winery was sold - on a handshake - to Mick and Pam Luckhurst. Helga Serwo saw them as young people with fresh ideas.

Mick Luckhurst was born in Port Alberni in 1950 and carved out a career as a lumber broker, an operator of a building supply store and latterly, a real estate developer in Edmonton. Pam, who is from Manchester, is a former flight attendant who is Mick's right hand in business.

Edmonton winters drove them to an early retirement in the Okanagan in 2003. There, they were introduced to wineries when they spent the summer touring visiting friends around the valley. Bored with inactivity and attracted to the wine lifestyle, they decided to purchase the Serwo winery.

Their first move after taking over the winery was to recruit a winemaker named Lawrence Herder. Trained in California, where he had owned a winery, Herder was then one of the winemakers at the big Jackson-Triggs winery. However, JT winemakers are not permitted to freelance on the side - and he was planning his own winery in the Similkameen Valley. The Luckhursts were comfortable with that.

There was very little wine in the winery when the Luckhursts took over. In the fall of 2003, the Serwo family sold all of its grapes and made no wine for Golden Mile. Herder went to other Okanagan wineries, purchasing enough wine to get Golden Mile through a couple of seasons. He added his own touch to finishing the wines, both in blending and in oak aging. He was able to buy good wines and he added value to them.

After the 2004 vintage, Herder decided he wanted to focus exclusively on Herder Winery. The winemaker who succeeds him at Golden Mile in March is Michael Bartier, formerly the winemaker at Township 7.

The talented Bartier is a great catch for the Luckhursts (and a big loss for Township 7). Among other achievements, he has twice made Chardonnay wines that were judged best in the country at the Canadian Wine Awards. He starts with an advantage at Golden Mile: Herder left behind a cellar full of well-made wine from 2004.

It remains to be seen when the 2004 wines will be released. Currently, Golden Mile is finishing the sales of its 2002 Meritage and its 2003 Pinot Noir. In the spring, the winery will release a 2003 Chardonnay, a 2003 Merlot and an aromatic blend called Road 13 White. (The castle is at the west end of Road 13.)

The good news is that the wines will have a new label. The original Golden Mile labels were Germanic. The Luckhursts came up with a design that had more life but, visually, was one of the least attractive of Okanagan wine labels. The labels resembled a knight's shield, half of it tan and the other half purple. It was impossible to imagine something so garish on a restaurant table, unless it was a medieval-themed eatery.  (There is one in Taiwan!)

"We will debut our new label in the spring," Pam says. "It will be very elegant and understated, and well suited to the style of wines we are producing." It sounds like a label that will cut it with sommeliers.

John Schreiner is the author of The Wineries of British Columbia.