After years of hard work and perseverance their dream has finally become a reality.
Shady Lane Estate was once just an idea, but now is a a new winery that makes flavourful strawberry wines made in small batches.
The winery is located just outside of Barrhead, and has recently opened its doors to the public.
The Zdrodowski family had been talking about turning their family owned fruit business into a winery for years, and it wasn’t until two and a half years ago that they turned those late night conversations into a business.
The family does the work themselves, from picking the fruit to labeling the bottles.
“We are a part of everything, the whole way through,” Nathan Zdrodowski said.
It took several years to turn the business into a winery, with the first bottle selling just over a week ago.
“Between all the paperwork, and trying to get all of the bugs worked out of things, we are finally selling wine now,” he said.
After seven test batches, the family finally settled on two different wines to bottle.
“We have Erdbeeren III and Erdbeeren VII,” Emily Zdrodowski said, adding Erdbeeren III is comparable to a desert wine.
“It is very, very sweet, very dramatic with lots of flavour. It grabs your attention,” she said. “If you are looking for a conversation starter, or something that is really, really different and tastes like strawberries, that’s it for sure.”
The second wine they are currently producing, Erdbeeren VII, is a semi-sweet wine, which Emily describes as intense, and has a similar strawberry taste as Erdbeeren III.
“It’s not as dramatic, it doesn’t grab your focus the same way that Erdbeeren III does,” she said.
When the Zdrodowski’s first moved to Barrhead they started a u-pick berry farm, but over the years decided to make the transition into wine making.
“After years and years of talking about it, we finally went ahead with the business,” Nathan said.
The family purchased a good portion of their equipment from Italy, but purchased the products through a Canadian company.
“Almost all of it is from Italy, but we got it all from Ontario,” Nathan said.
The system they use means keeping the strawberries off of the ground, which helps with weeding, and picking.
“They are all raised about three-and-a-half, four feet off of the ground, that way weeding pretty much doesn’t exist, and picking the berries is a lot better,” Nathan said.
This system also allows the berries to grow large in size.
“One berry will fill up your whole hand, it’s amazing,” Nathan said.
Emily added that the fruit is grown without the use of chemicals, and is done completely natural.
“We don’t use any pesticides, any herbicides, we don’t use any chemicals to ripen our fruit, it is all ripened right on the vine,” Emily said.
The winery is located just outside of Barrhead, on Hwy. 44, and is open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 12 to 6.
“We would be open to anybody coming or anybody looking,” Emily said, adding that to make an appointment for a tour they should call ahead.
“We are going to have planned wine tours as soon as spring comes,” Nathan said. “The full experience will be when you can see the fruit and see everything.”
Nathan said seeing it come together is surreal and it finally sank in once he held the first labeled bottle of wine.
“As soon as we held that in our hands, I was like, oh my goodness, we are actually doing this, we own a winery,” he said.
