New winery pops cork on first Christmas celebration
By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on December 19, 2023.
Little Gem Winery held its inaugural Christmas on Saturday to expose its brand to more people.Attendees had the opportunity to taste wine, enjoy a cup of hot chocolate, try some food, sit by the fire, go on tractor rides and ride a horse named Charlie.
“We just want to bring people out,” said Jordan Sinke, Little Gem Winery co-owner.
The event was an opportunity to “let people try our wines, see what they think about it, get feedback from our wines, kind of let people know that we have a tasting room” and try products from other local companies such as Crystal Springs and Prairie Hill Farms,” he said.
Little Gem is developing a name for its product.
“We found working together with restaurants really helped,” said Sinke, whose products are slowly getting onto liquor store shelves.
The winery built a tasting room in July just to get the company name out in the public realm and to try getting people to taste their products.
“We got a little bit of funding from Alberta and Canadian governments so that really, really helped get us off our feet as well,” said Sinke.
“That’s the only reason we have the tasting room.”
Their goal has been to grow their inventory and the hope in the next two years is to sell more cases of wine slowly throughout the province.
Little Gem is the only winery south of the Calgary and looks to capitalize on tourism.
“We felt just because we were the only winery here, we were very unique, there was nothing like it,” said Sinke.
“If we open the tasting room, we can bring people here. We had talked to Crystal Springs ;they have a café and they said we were shocked how busy their café is. We felt from talking to other agri-food industries tourism that there was potential here.”
The future hope is to build a patio out front for people to enjoy, as well as to sell product in more liquor stores and keep the tasting room open more days during the week. 2
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