Phil Lo’s Wine Journey with Friends of the Vine

PROLOGUE

I was born and raised in Hong Kong when it was under British rule.  Wine is not part of our culture nor in my family upbringing.  However, I have a secret to share here.  I was introduced to Cognac and Scotch at an early age before 10 by my uncle, my mother’s big brother.

I came to Canada alone when I was 20 years old in 1970.  A few months into my first year at university, I turned 21.  This was a big deal at that time.  In Ontario then, you must be 21 to buy beer, wines and spirit.  I became very popular in the dorm, and every weekend I received a long list of orders from the other kids who were not yet 21.  I was driven every Saturday morning to the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) outlet with a pile of cash and a long list of orders.  My payoff was a case of beer for the week.  At one point, the clerk at the outlet asked if I was running a restaurant.  That was the humble beginning of my wine journey in Canada.

MY JOURNEY BEFORE FOV

I graduated from university and started working in 1974 and married Goretti in 1977.  We started trying out wines with our dinners, first at home and eventually in restaurants.  We enjoyed some of the familiar names other people our age would remember very well.  Things like Baby Duck, Black Tower, Blue Nun, Mouton Cadet and of course the romantic Italian dinners with Chianti in a bottle with the fiasco baskets!

Over the next few years I had more exposure to wines with colleagues and bosses during business lunches and sometimes dinners when traveling for business.  I still remembered some of these people who had an influence on me to get interested in wines.  There was Paul (RIP) who was my supervisor in construction in Sarnia, Ontario, where I was posted as a junior engineer to his department for a good three months.  Paul was into wines and had to have wines with every dinner.  Then there were Robert and Brian, who worked on the same floor when I was transferred back to Toronto.  These two gentlemen talked about wines constantly outside of work (and sometimes before and after meetings).  They were also subscribers to Wine Spectators when it was still a tabloid.  I was helped by them when they passed on old copies of the Wine Spectators monthly.  One could not help but start to get interested in wines.  And with their influence, I started my first purchase of Grand Cru Classés Bordeaux vintage 1982.

It was around that time in the early 1980s that I started getting serious about buying wines to start a cellar.  I remember, I started out with perhaps 20 or so bottles, eventually building up to 50 or so bottles.  Around that time, I was posted to sales.  I was selling industrial gases which involved minimum 10-year and longer contracts and building on-site oxygen and nitrogen plants to supply those contract customers.  It was not a simple sales job but involved getting in early on customers’ projects from inception, to scoping, to construction.  To help build rapport over the many years of the selling cycle, I routinely was wining and dining clients’ project teams including engineers, project managers and sometime senior level managers up to the VP level.  That was the time I was pushed to get a bit more knowledge than just causally drinking wines.  I had to be comfortable to order wines for lunches and dinners for up to 10 people or more, sometime with my boss and his boss’ presence when we wrapped up a contract or started up a plant or pipeline.

FRIENDS OF THE VINE

Fast forward to 1992.  An accident the company I was working for had an industrial incidence halfway around the world in India, which caused the US parent to cut back on employment and ran lot tighter controls in their subsidiaries including Canada.  I was 42, with an engineering degree and an MBA, and had always wanted to have my own business.  I decided that it was then or never to jump.  I took a severance package, bought a franchise and moved the family west to Alberta.  And as they say, the rest is history.

In 1993, Justin, my youngest was in kindergarten.  One of the kids in his class was Brandon Nichols, Walter Radizowsky’s youngest stepson.  Goretti befriended Donna Radizowky early that school year.  At some point Donna asked if Goretti or her husband were into wines.  Goretti’s response: “Phil is nuts about wine”.  That was when I first became a member of FOV.

I met Walter through meetings, gatherings, tastings and functions.  We eventually became good friends.  I remembered a few wine shopping trips in around Calgary to some of the shops in the city.  I remembered giving each other our opinions of certain wines and their agebility.  Walter was more into Burgundies, and I was more interested into Bordeaux.  I remembered getting to know Conrad Porth, Ivan Makiw, then Boyd Russell in those early years, and later Joe Pellan, Tara Glumac and then Doug Crapo (I met Doug first at the Grand Cru Society before he eventually joined the FOV).  Except for Ivan, all these guys eventually became presidents of FOV over the years.  And Tara is our current president.

Back in the early years, there were more restaurant meals paired with wines.  Walter had a lot of contacts in the restaurant business through some of his clients.  And by the time I joined in 1993, the Mountain Escape was already a staple event in the Club.

From 1993 through to 1998, I was in a bit of financial hardship.  My business did not breakeven until 1996, and I was paying myself only $40,000 a year.  Goretti was a stay home mom with the two kids who were not yet 12.  Owning and especially starting a business was a lot harsher than I had imagined, and they never taught you that in business school!  FOV’s events and the Mountain Escape helped tremendously as they were more economical and affordable than had we would have arranged them on our own.

During those early years, Mountain Escape was held every year at the Rimrock Hotel in Banff for a good decade and more.  Members would bring along their young kids and the kids would group together and ate in the café restaurant led by the slightly older kids.  I remembered Boyd’s oldest girl was the same age as Nick, my oldest, and they were in the same grade, and the younger girl was a year or two older than my youngest boy, Justin and Walter’s youngest boy, Brandon.  The two girls and my boys, plus Walter’s older boy and Brandon all went to the same school, Saint Philip’s, so they knew each other.  Conrad’s girl, Margaux was a couple of years older than Boyd’s girls and would act as leader for the whole bunch of them.  The youngsters seemed to have a good time while we adults sat through our enjoyable dinner paired with fabulous wines.

Wine tastings back in those early years were mostly organized and led by members who were more knowledgeable in the theme country elected by Walter.  The presentation was more like a mutual learning experience among the attendees.  The organizing member and Walter would go and tasted ahead of the event and chose the wines for the tasting at the venue, usually Willow Park, Metrovino, and the now defunct, Vinoteca.  They would have pre-tasted and selected the wines in the venue and made sure the wines selected were of enough inventory at the shop for members to purchase during the tasting night.

Some of these tastings in those early years really helped my knowledge and the diversification of my cellar buildup.  Some of you may remember that 1992, 1994 and 1997 were all bad years for Bordeaux.  I was also having financial difficulties due to the start up years of my business to afford the rising prices of my beloved Bordeaux.  I did not stop buying though, but I had to severely curtailed my buying in the early 90s and to turn to something more affordable.  These things combined pushed me to start looking at Chianti Classicals.  I remembered a tasting FOV put on by Ivan and Conrad to introduce the members to Tuscan wines.  That was very helpful as up to this point I was still thinking of Chianti as those funky bottles with the fiasco baskets.  Chianti Classical happened to have a few very fine and excellent years right about that time.  Another memorable tasting, which also helped in my cellar diversification was the Languedoc and Roussillon tasting held a few years later at Metrovino. This one was organized by Boyd, and I helped in the pre-tasting.

The SAIT dinner and Summer Bar-B-Que were not yet on the event roster back in those early years. They came later in the late ‘90’s and even the early  2000’s.  In fact, there was a period, there were more dinner events than tasting events which lead to my FOV-refugee years coming up next.

MY FOV-REFUGEE YEARS

About this time, a few new members had joined FOV from the Slow Food Movement.  They liked our wine pairing events, but they were more into food and our dinner events.  Eventually, they started pushing the event roster to include even more food events and less and less tasting events.  At some point FOV almost became a dinner club instead of a wine club.  I got to the point of not liking the changes and decided to look outside FOV.  The Grand Cru Society was the first place I explored. They are more wine focused, and they have their own cellar.  They were having some interesting tasting events with wines from their cellar.  I went to a couple of those and decided to join them.  Then followed Boyd and Con, without my influencing them.  However, we were not very happy after a year or two.  The culture between them and FOV was quite drastic.  We were used to discussing and talking about the wines during tasting held by FOV.  The Grand Cru culture was more formal and serious about the tasting.  They called for total silence during the tasting.  Perhaps because we talked too much during the tastings, the three of us were kind of looked at with some unwelcoming looks.  Con left and went back to FOV after one year, I believe.  Boyd stuck it out for another year and then went back to FOV.  I stuck it out for another half a year and returned.

BACK TO FOV

When Boyd and Con returned, they both eventually became presidents to push the more tasting agenda.  With Joe Pellan’s term in between theirs, I enjoyed a five to six years period of wine focused tastings.  And perhaps because of those tastings, my cellar was growing from about 500 hundred bottles to over 1,000 by that time in just a few years.

At this point, my business finally became profitable.  We went through a period of tremendous growth.  I started the Edmonton office and was busy running the two locations with a lot of traveling between the two cities.  I still attended FOV events, but with Walter’s passing and the eventual demise of the Mountain Escape event and the SAIT dinner, I was less active even as a member.  Then came COVID-19.

MY OWN RETIREMENT AND JOINING THE BOARD

I retired in early 2020 from my business, just prior to COVID showing up in Canada.  By 2023, it was over, and I was looking for something to occupy my time and to rekindle my love of wine.  I decided to ask to join the FOV Board to push my own interest and agenda.  By now, my cellar has grown past 1,600 bottles and in 2024, I finally built myself a proper cellar.  (Go to the  FOV website and click on Blogs, Wine Ramblings XVI ‘My New Wine Cellar ’to  read more about that.)

EPILOGUE

There are a still few friendships continuing currently.  Worth mentioning is - Justin and Brandon are still very close friends.  They served as Bestman at each other’s wedding and now both have their own kids, and I look forward to the next generation to become friends.  Both are into wines and are members of FOV.  Ian Radizowsky, Walter’s son was president of FOV back a few years, and still occasionally attends FOV events.  Boyd and Conrad and Ivan are still among my closest drinking buddies.  We still get together often to have our private tastings and dinners (see my Wine Ramblings XXI for our joint anniversaries dinner in August 2025).