Manufacturing in Manitoba

6 WINNIPEG FREE PRESS - THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 2018 North America's Bus Leader A team 6000 strong. Over 50 years manufacturing zero-emission buses. Nearly 90 years of leading innovation. Manitoba has its very own winery — which is surprising, since it's not exactly grape country around here. But other fruits are readily available, and two spirited young entrepreneurs have discovered that with the right inputs, fruit wine production is a viable business venture in Manitoba. Willows Christopher and Zach Isaacs started Shrugging Doctor Beverage Company — Winnipeg's only winery — right out of high school. "I do the sales and marketing side, and Zach is our winemaker," says Christopher. "He's the guy with all the recipes and chemistry." Friends since junior high school, they started making wine as a way to save money, and they became quite passionate about the product. "It was a perfect storm of things," says Christopher, who is also founder of the Manitoba Association of Winemakers. "We'd already been winemaking and at the same time a lot of de-regulation happened and the (Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries) reformed." They learned everything from the ground up, but they weren't always taken seriously. Naysayers figured they were making wine a bit before their time. "When you're 18 years old and you walk into a bank, what they hear is, 'I've never had a job before, I've never run a business, I have no credit history, I have no assets and I want to start a business about getting drunk,' " he says. "So ... a little bit hard to get funding." They needed mentorship and encouragement and they found it with Futurpreneur Canada, a non-profit organization that specializes in assisting young entrepreneurs. "They took us seriously. When we first started, we had a lot of resistance, a lot of, 'You guys are kids, don't do that, it's not going to work,' " he says. Futurpreneur helped them to shape their business plan and develop the professional skills they needed to get funding and launch the business. "They've been pretty great to us the entire experience — I owe a lot of my success to them." The business has been up and running since January 2017, and Christopher and Isaacs continue to refine their offerings. "We have five which we produce all the time — the apple cider, a cranberry wine, a raspberry wine and we have two kinds of mead which is like a honey wine," Christopher says. "Then I have two rotating small-batch wines, and the one we just ran out of was our strawberry rhubarb wine. I actually picked those strawberries myself, so I know how fresh that whole batch was." Obviously, Christopher and Isaacs aren't afraid of hard work. They are creative in sourcing, and diligent about wastefulness. "The sangria we had made over the summer was originally a chokecherry wine we used local inputs for, but the wine turned out more bitter than I liked, so we turned it into a sangria to save it because I didn't just want to waste the wine," Christopher says. The strawberry rhubarb wine was another reward of thrift. "A good chunk of the rhubarb was donated to us by some Manitoba agricultural researchers doing research on growing rhubarb commercially," he says. "We were reading this report and thinking, 'Hey, I wonder what they're doing with all this rhubarb?' So we called and asked them if we could have some and they said, 'Yeah, sure, come and take the rhubarb we're not using.' " Shrugging Doctor sources about 50 per cent of its ingredients locally, and all the inputs are 100 per cent Canadian. "We opened the winery in January in Winnipeg and some things we just couldn't get here, so for a lot of our higher-volume products, like the cider, we are buying from B.C. in the Okanagan area — you can't argue with their scale and prices," Christopher says. "For the meads, all our honey comes from Manitoba near Minnedosa; our Saskatoons are local from Purple Berry Orchard just outside of Winnipeg; our chokecherries are local; our strawberries and rhubarb are local." Christopher says there's a sweet spot between meeting the desires of consumers for locally sourced product and meeting a tight budget. "Even if I could get a better price, I'd want to stay Canadian," he says. "Number one is because I care, and the other is 100 per cent Canadian wines get tax benefits. So it's better for us to do that." Shrugging Doctor's current capacity is about 5,000 litres per month and the company has enjoyed steady growth. "The first order the Liquor Mart placed with me was for 28 cases, and the latest order of cider they placed was for 130 cases," he says. Shrugging Doctor is available at the company door, located at 448B Brooklyn St., online at shrugdoc.com, through Skip the Dishes and at Manitoba Liquor Marts throughout the province, though some wines are available only from the winery. "We run a within-the-hour home delivery service, seven days a week, 6 p.m. to midnight, and we've done that since we founded in January 2017, so I like to have some exclusives on there," Christopher says. "It motivates people to use my service and we obviously make more money." ❙ SUCCESS IN A BOTTLE YOUNG WINEMAKERS ENJOY THE FRUITS OF THEIR LABOURS By Wendy King for the Free Press is ot it ture rted — Zach is s the rted d th they ey uct. "Then and th strawb those s fresh t Obviou afraid sourcin "The sa summe used lo more b sangri Young entrepreneurs Willows Christopher (left) and Zach Isaacs turned a money-saving hobby into a money-making business, producing and marketing a full line of fruit wines.

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