Château des Charmes

These interviews are part of our feature on winemaking families from the June/July 2011 issue.

They are father and son, but they share a bond beyond bloodlines. Paul Bosc, the mentor, winemaker, viticulturalist and visionary, and son Paul-André Bosc, the businessman, the salesman, the student. Their family was exiled from their home country of Algeria during that country’s civil war in the 1960s because they were part of the French minority in a Muslim country.

Paul, educated in viticulture and oenology, worked at the Chateau Gai wine company for 15 years before deciding to build Château des Charmes with his family.

Paul Bosc

Q: What was your big break?

A: I quit a very good job to go on my own; let’s put it that way. That would be my big break. At the time, people thought the guy was out of his mind — the guy is quitting his job to go out on his own. That was 32 years ago. It takes a country like Canada to allow somebody like me to do what I’ve done.

Q: Tell me about the moment you knew you’d made it — that you were going to be successful — as a winemaker.

A: I knew we were going to be successful when I started winning a lot of medals internationally. And today I’m convinced that we are as good as anyone else in the world.

Q: When it comes to winemaking, what is your passion?

A: My passion is to be on the scientific side of it. It’s something that, every year, you get more passionate about because you acquire more knowledge and you never stop learning and studying.

Q: What do you want people to remember about your wines?

A: It’s genuine wine. It’s classic in every category. If it’s chardonnay, it’s distinctive chardonnay, but typical chardonnay. Not chardonnay that doesn’t taste like chardonnay. I want to stay within the profile of the varietal.

Q: What are your hopes for the future of your winery, say 30 or 50 years down the road?

A: My hope would be that when you talk about Château des Charmes 50 years from now, you talk about it the same way you would talk about Château Palmer or any of those châteaux in France which have an international reputation.

Q: What do you do when you’re not making wine?

A: Until very recently [a year ago at age 74] I was riding horses. And that’s pretty well it. When I was a kid, what attracted me was grapes, trees and animals. At one time, I wanted to become a veterinarian, but I thought that was going to take me too long. I have five Egyptian Arabian horses.

Q: What are your thoughts on organic/biodynamic farming?

A: Taking care of a vineyard is just like taking care of an animal. You’ve got to make sure it’s in good health, make sure that it grows and does not suffer. So that’s why we are not trying to declare ourselves organic. I can’t have any mildew in my vineyards. I can’t have any red mites. I can’t have any berry moths. This affects the quality of the fruit so much that it is not something that I could accept.

Although we are 75 percent organic, I don’t want to try to be 100 percent, because I don’t want my vineyards to suffer.

Paul-André Bosc

Q: How did you get your start in the industry?

A: I didn’t volunteer. I was conscripted. My dad bought his first farm when I was pretty young, 13 or 14 … and a few years later he started the winery. We made every possible mistake you can make.

Q: What was your big break? Tell me about the moment you knew that you were going to be successful.

A: It was almost 17 years ago now — the grand opening of the château — because it was very tangible. It was there. It was real. We had owned the land for seven years and had slowly begun to nurture it, started to plant the vineyards. Not only was this important to our company and my family, but I understood the significance of it for Niagara’s wine industry.

Q: Who are your influences?

A: Beyond the obvious answer of my parents, my wife, Michèle. We’re partners in this; we’re not only husband and wife. We work at the winery together. She’s a very bright woman.

Q: What do you want people to remember about your wines?

A: I want people to appreciate our wines, not just because they happened to like it at that moment, but think about how it’s taken years to make this particular wine and was made by a family and its employees that have been doing this for a long time.

Q: What are your hopes for the future of your winery, say 30 to 50 years down the road?

A:To me, it’s far more important that the winery has a 50- or 100-year history still ahead of it and is employing people, contributing to the industry, than to be still around in 50 years and still owned and managed by the Bosc family. Sometimes families run out of luck. What matters more to me is that the institution be preserved and move on. That passion need not come from the immediate members of your family. But I don’t think a lot about these things. In order to be around in 20 or 30 years, you have to do well this year.

Q: What do you do when you’re not making wine?

A: There’s nothing, nothing I like doing more than being with my boy. That’s enormously important to me.