From Pro Hockey Player to Wall Street Lawyer to Winemaker
Photos by Tarynn Liv Parker.

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From Pro Hockey Player to Wall Street Lawyer to Winemaker

“A wine is made well if, after having a sip, you want to drink the entire bottle.”

Growing up on a grain farm in Saskatchewan may not be the most common path to winemaking.

Then again, neither are professional hockey and corporate law. Yet these were the many roads embarked upon by Tyler Harlton before he arrived in Summerland, British Columbia to start his own winery, TH Wines.

Tyler Harlton working the vines. All photos by Tarynn Liv Parker.

"On the grain farm, we were growing durum wheat, which has a high protein content because of the plant stress," Harlton recounts. "This thing we were making in Saskatchewan had a high value because there was something very specific about it. It's the same thing in France; there's value because there is something very specific about those grapes. Wines show a time and place in a unique way, like the grain farm."

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The way Harlton saw it, growing up in rural Saskatchewan meant either becoming a pro hockey player or a farmer. He opted for the former but ended up doing the latter.

Hockey was a pillar of Harlton's youth. He was eventually drafted by the St. Louis Blues and played professionally in the AHL for four years. Despite dedicating so much time to hockey, however, Harlton says he has zero regrets about not making it to the NHL.

Not only did he escape from his hockey career unscathed—more than a lot of professional hockey players can say—but it also informed his winemaking.

"I took so much away from it. I learned that if you want to be good at something, you have to work harder than everyone around you. It taught me a lot about work ethic. I do a lot of manual labour now; it's really hard work, but I've saved a lot of money by not buying equipment and doing the work by hand, which is reflected in the quality."

When Harlton eventually quit hockey for good, it was off to Montreal for law school and a fateful encounter with a bottle of Alsatian pinot gris.

"That bottle really opened my eyes to what wine could be. Growing up in Saskatchewan, you were never really tasting nice wines—it was all industrial, sweet wine. In hindsight, it was probably a $20 bottle. It wasn't like, 'Oh, I had my first Chateau Margot!' It was just a normal wine from France and that was enough to spark some interest in me. At that point, I didn't have any deeper motives than drinking wine."

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Though social justice is what initially attracted him to law, Harlton would end up gravitating toward the dark side, working as a summer associate in a Wall Street law firm right before the global economic crash of 2008. But all the while, the grapes of France were in the back of his mind.

"They were paying law students a lot of money back then in the hopes that they would accept a lucrative offer to be a Wall Street lawyer. That experience soured me on law in general. I became a bit disillusioned and realized that I didn't want to be a Wall Street lawyer and said, 'This wine thing is definitely worth exploring.'"

In his last year of law school, Harlton did an exchange in Paris, spending weekends in wine country, where became exposed to a form of agriculture not unlike that he experienced in his youth. "In France, the wine is really about farming and that's where there's a connection for me, having grown up on a farm. Being in France made me understand that connection between food and wine and that's what set me in a new direction. I could kind of see where I was going at that point."

Not cut out for corporate law, Harlton decided to give the legal profession one last shot as a "small-town lawyer" in the Okanagan Valley in BC—but he wasn't suited for that either. Rather, the wine gods had put him where he needed to be to grow grapes; starting in the cellar at Osoyoos Larose and eventually working his way up to his own winery, which he decided to name after himself, "Back in Saskatchewan, when you're a farmer, you basically just put your name on your farm."

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And while he isn't completely sheltered from the dreaded spring frost that can wipe out entire vintages in one fell swoop, the valley is unquestionably a good patch of land on which to grow grapes.

"What's neat about the Okanagan Valley is that it's this pocket desert. It doesn't get too cold in the winter and during the summer it's super hot and super dry. It's almost like the Mediterranean for ripening fruits, so we can grow French vines here. There's a lot of moisture and humidity in places like Quebec and Ontario. In my opinion this is a better climate for growing grapes here."

He adds, "Without excellent grapes, you can't make excellent wine. And without excellent farming, you can't make an excellent grape. There is definitely a connection there. But it also has to be the right grape in the right region."

Climate aside, there are other obstacles facing a winemaker who wants to make wines on the less interventionist side of the farming spectrum. "In France, wine is almost considered like food. In Canada, it's a restricted substance. There's a massive amount of regulation. Also, the Canadian wine public doesn't have the same taste as in Europe. We're dealing with a marketplace where people want sweet, industrial wines that don't reflect a time and place at all."

Not completely comfortable with "organic" or "natural" wine classification, he describes his process first and foremost as being "by hand." That means minimal intervention on the grapes and a lot of work in the field.

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"Making wine by hand and avoiding equipment is my basic philosophy. It gives you a really good idea of what's going on with the grapes, and that really translates to quality because of care and attention. The harder you work, the better the product becomes. Take law school or the bar exam, for example; an extra 500 hours of studying isn't necessarily going to get you a better grade. But when it comes to farming, you can definitely see the results of that time in the final product."

The final product in this case is low on tannins, oak, and sulfur. Extraction is minimal, meaning that the vine and grape are front and center. It's the end result of a thoughtful farming process, but also two decades of trying his hand at careers that didn't work out as planned.

Harlton's advice for young people not sure about their path in life?

"Exhale to the point where you can actually hear stuff. Without building space for yourself, you can't even listen to yourself. If you hang around lawyers all day, you're going to start thinking like a lawyer. That's not a bad thing, but you can get wrapped up in the herd mentality—same with hockey. But if you want to figure out what makes you happy, you really need to build that space."

We'll drink to that.