Bill Eggert: The Straight-Shooter at Fairview Cellars

On the first hot Okanagan morning in May this year, several golfers stopped to buy wine on the way to the course. Bill Eggert talked them out of it!

The reason reveals a good deal about Eggert's attitude toward his customers. He figured the golfers would park their car in the blazing sun and, while they played their 18 holes, the wines would bake in the trunk and would deteriorate. He suggested they should come back for the wine on the way home.

As he admitted later, the odds were that they would forget to come back. But he would sooner lose a sale once rather than disappoint them with beaten-up wine.

That is typical of how he tries to take care of his customers. This spring, he e-mailed his customers, advising them to drink the 1998 Cabernet Franc because that wine, from a very hot vintage, was starting to tire. A lot of his customers thanked him for the warning, even if it was academic. "For most people, it's gone anyway," Eggert discovered. He only made 100 cases.

And when he decided his 2001 wines were not quite as good as those from the better 2000 vintage, he rolled the prices back. But a word of warning: he figures 2002 was a very fine vintage and it will be priced accordingly.

In the world of Okanagan wine, Bill Eggert is a rough diamond with a developing cult following. Born in Ottawa in 1957, the son of a mining engineer, he became enamoured with vineyards while working on one owned by an uncle in the Niagara Peninsula. When he could not convince his uncle to replant labrusca with vinifera, Eggert came to British Columbia in 1983 to work in Okanagan vineyards.

He purchased his six-acre Fairview property in 1989. It was then a raw plateau above what is now the first hole at the Fairview golf club. Beginning in 1993, he has planted the vineyard almost entirely to three Bordeaux reds - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc.

"I have some of the best land for supporting reds and I honestly didn't want to waste any of my land on supporting whites," Eggert explains. "We're in the hottest area in Canada where they grow grapes. We've got 200 more heat units than almost anywhere else in Canada. When you compare the heat units to Bordeaux, we're fifty to 100 more heat units even than Bordeaux."

Eggert, who has both taken courses and taught at Okanagan University College, quickly figured out that his vineyard would only support him if he turned the grapes into wine. He had also been making wine since adolescence and was not afraid of scaling up to commercial size, especially when he could call on some of his winemaking peers for consulting advice (as he did to make a 2002 Merlot icewine, a one-off project on behalf of another grapegrower).

His intent, before opening in 2000, was to make just one wine, a blended Bordeaux red. "But the 1998 Cabernet Franc was so nice that I did it on its own," he recalls. Now, he manages to squeeze several varietals, a Meritage, and some reserve wines from his compact vineyard.

The vineyard will be in full production this year. Eggert expects the harvest will allow him to make 1,500 cases of wine. That makes Fairview Cellars one of the smallest premium wineries in the Okanagan - which is just fine with those looking for wines that are somewhat exclusive.

And exclusive is the operative word. This is perhaps the only winery in the Okanagan without a highway sign to provide directions to visitors. The golf club is signed but not everyone makes the connection.

"That is part of my strategy too," Eggert admits. "I'm a one-man operation here. I have a lot to do. The people that appreciate my wine will seek me out. They'll spend an hour trying to find the damn place and be pissed off when they get up here. But I say:  'Look around - do you stand in line for your taste or do you get to talk to me personally?' It works. They appreciate that."

John Schreiner is the author of British Columbia Wine Country.