Making an Industry

Abstract This article examines how fruit growers in British Columbia and the provincial government got into the business of making wine in the first half of the twentieth century. Growers sought primarily to sell fruit and saw wine as a possible additional source of revenue. Rather than pointing solely to climatic differences or the cultures of potential consumers, this article argues that the interests of growers and provincial liquor policies both made and stifled the wine industry. This case study of small-scale production and growers’ indifference to wine casts light on the importance of the individual initiatives of winemakers in other regions around the world. As the BC wine industry took off in the 1920s, it was made up of a mix of fruit wine, poor grape wine made from table grapes, and experiments with Vitis vinifera. Wines made from loganberries and Vitis labrusca grapes were not just the precursor to the modern wine industry but were also two kinds of fruit that growers balanced alongside hardy apples and other fruits.