6130 Old West Saanich Rd.
Victoria, BC
A clerk of the citizenship court in Victoria, Carol Wallace was born in Niagara Falls in 1959. When she looked for something to grow on her small Saanich farm in 1993, she took the advice of her Ontario-based stepfather, a grape grower, to plant vines. “A lot of people had berry farms,” Wallace recalls.
“I wanted to grow something that was not prickly and that did not make me crawl on my knees to pick.” She also buys some Okanagan grapes for red wines, but has planted small blocks of St. Laurent and Blattner red varieties on her property, including eight rows of a Blattner #48, an early ripening red. She calls the grape Labelle – Dutch for dragonfly.