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Mick Luckhurst remembers, in all its cruel detail, the moment he nearly quit the winery.
It was 10 o'clock on a cold, black Okanagan night. All alone, he was running a computerized grape press, a machine the admitted Luddite barely knew how to run. Heaps of harvested grapes were slowly shrinking. The purple nectar was flowing. He and his wife Pam's months-old decision to retire on a vineyard was looking pretty good.
And then the machine died.
A whole day's harvest was in jeopardy.
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"I've never been so stressed in my life," says the 58-year-old proprietor of Road 13 Vineyards, formerly known as Golden Mile Cellars, in Oliver, B.C. "And that was exactly what I was trying to leave behind."
The Luckhursts had purchased the winery in December, 2003, to escape a taxing work life, following a parade of Canadian retirees away from the rat race and into the vineyard.
One of them, Alfonso Gagliano, the 66-year-old retired cabinet minister and key player in the federal sponsorship scandal, recently made news for receiving a $550,000 federal loan to buy a winery in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
He's the newest and most prominent member of a hundreds-strong collection of older Canadians who have retired in recent years to age among the oak barrels.
In British Columbia's fast-growing wine regions alone, retirees run at least 10 of the 83 new wineries that have cropped up over the past eight years.
The trend is much the same in Ontario.
Boomers are seeking the sun-kissed, wine-soaked dreams so often shown in advertisements for banks and investment firms.
If the experiences of Mr. Luckhurst and hundreds of other grey-haired vintners before him are any indication, Mr. Gagliano is in for a shock.
"Owning a winery is sexy," says Lisa Cameron, communications manager for the B.C. Wine Institute. "Many people getting into it don't realize it's actually farming and that when you get right down to it, it's very hard work."
Mr. Luckhurst eventually fixed that wonky grape press, but not before spending the night and most of the morning on the phone to an Australian technician. "So much of that first year was awful, just awful."
In a previous life, Mr. Luckhurst was a highly successful lumber broker and land developer. By his 50s, mounting stress had reached a breaking point. "I was getting angrier and angrier," he says. "I was drinking heavily. I realized one day that I was going to pitch over of a heart attack if I didn't change." So Mr. Luckhurst sought solace in the vines.
"It's this dream that has been planted in the zeitgeist," says Geoffrey Heinricks, a vintner who wrote about his experience of leaving Toronto to start a vineyard in A Fool and Forty Acres. "You see so many commercials for estate planning where a couple is dreaming of a vineyard in Napa. It's something the advertisers are certainly spinning out."
That dream snagged George Hanson. The 51-year-old retired early from Northwestel in Yukon and immediately moved to B.C.'s Similkameen region to start Seven Stones Winery. "I was looking at it from a rosy, romantic point of view," he says. "That romantic vision leaves at about hour three when you realize how much work it is."
Mr. Hanson also thought about backing out in his first year. While bulldozing trenches to plant vines, he dislodged a minefield of rocks, some six feet in diameter. "I had to hire a crew of eight people out there just to move rocks."
Mr. Hanson has finally grown used to the 5 a.m. wake-ups and dirty fingernails common among pro winemakers.
The dream itself is as old as dirt. Mr. Heinricks points out that in the year 305 the Roman emperor Diocletian retired to a cabbage farm and remained there despite demands he retake power. "Humans are wired to be tied to the land," Mr. Heinricks says. "It's always been that way."
But they didn't always start getting their hands dirty so late in life. Freshly planted vineyards usually don't yield usable grapes for at least four years. "That gives some of these people about 10 vintages before their bones give out," he says. "You can make wine into your 70s and 80s, but the field work is beyond most 65-year-olds."
Pauline Joicey and Gilbert Provost, two retired civil servants, may object to that.
In 2004, the couple planted their first vines in Consecon, a village in Ontario's Prince Edward County. Two years later, they were picking Red Tail Vineyard's first harvest and feeling younger than ever.
"It was an adjustment at first, but we're in excellent physical shape," says Ms. Joicey, 61. "What would we be doing all day in our retirement if we weren't doing this?"
And their bureaucratic expertise has proved valuable in the wine industry. "You have to deal with a lot of regulations," she says with a chuckle. "That's not exactly foreign to me."
But for Mr. Luckhurst, all his previous work habits have proved useless.
"I always thought that if you woke the earliest, worked the hardest and went to sleep the latest, you'd come out on top," he says. "But this business is mad. We could produce the best wine in the world and not sell a bottle."
