Every wine region eventually produces a building that outlasts its own founders, its own name changes, and more than one corporate reshuffling — a physical address that keeps making wine long after the people who started it have been reduced to a paragraph in someone else’s history. In British Columbia, that building sits at 1125 Richter Street in downtown Kelowna, and its story runs back to the final grinding years of the Great Depression, through Prohibition-era desperation, a staged telegram con, a future premier’s brief and reluctant stint as a wine executive, and nearly a century of continuous production that makes it, by a comfortable margin, the oldest continuously operating winery in the province.
A company launched broke, in the worst possible year
The winery’s origin story begins not with vineyards but with apples, and not with confidence but with financial desperation. In 1931, Giuseppe Ghezzi, an Italian immigrant with a head for organizing rather than farming, pulled together a syndicate of Kelowna investors to bankroll a venture originally called Domestic Wines & By-Products — a name that reads today like a company trying very hard not to be noticed by prohibition authorities, which was more or less the point. Ghezzi’s own contribution to the legend involves considerably more theatre than most founding stories can claim, and not the flattering kind: to convince skeptical mining-town investors to part with their capital, he and his partners reportedly staged the arrival of a telegram announcing fresh wine orders at the precise moment a sales pitch to potential shareholders was underway, a small piece of manufactured momentum that, told plainly, amounts to a con — dressed up in a company history as charming founder-era hustle rather than what it actually was.
Ghezzi’s syndicate burned through its funding within the first year, and the operation would very likely have folded into a historical footnote if a Kelowna grocer named Cap Capozzi hadn’t stepped in to keep it alive. Capozzi is the man most commonly credited today as the winery’s founder, and while that credit technically overstates his role in the origin story, it’s hard to argue with the outcome: without the Capozzi family’s involvement, there’s a reasonable case the winery wouldn’t have survived its first decade, let alone its ninth. Rounding out the founding cast was W.A.C. Bennett, at the time a Kelowna hardware store owner who agreed to serve as the winery’s first president. Bennett was, by his own account, a teetotaller who never much cared for the product he was selling, but he understood the winery represented genuine local jobs during one of the leanest stretches of the twentieth century, and he and Capozzi spent the company’s earliest years travelling through the mining towns of BC’s southern interior together, selling shares to keep the operation solvent. Bennett resigned his position and sold his shares in 1941 when he pivoted toward provincial politics — a pivot that eventually made him British Columbia’s longest-serving premier, a twenty-year run in office that makes him, almost certainly, the only former wine company president to later control an entire provincial government.
The winery’s original product lineup leaned on apple wine rather than grape, a reasonable bet given the Okanagan’s booming apple-growing economy at the time, but the wines themselves were, by most surviving accounts, rough going. The switch to grape wine in 1935 marked the real beginning of the company that exists today, and the following year the operation formally adopted a new name, settled through a public contest that awarded a case of wine to whoever submitted the winning entry: Calona, a soft-edged nod to the Okanagan Valley’s original name for the area around Kelowna.
The name that survived everything
What makes 1125 Richter Street worth a serious look today isn’t simply that a winery has occupied it since the 1930s — plenty of old buildings hang onto a single tenant for decades without much of a story attached. What makes it worth a look is that the name Calona itself has survived nearly a century of ownership changes, market swings, and shifting Canadian taste without ever once being discontinued, even as almost everything built around it changed multiple times over.
Early sales were a genuine struggle. One quietly important turning point came when a local Kelowna priest persuaded the Catholic Church to begin sourcing its sacramental wine from Calona rather than from established American or European suppliers — a small institutional customer whose steady, unglamorous demand likely did more for the company’s survival through the difficult early years than any single marketing push. The Second World War brought a broader shift in fortunes: wartime cash flow and rising regional demand gave the winery its first genuinely stable financial footing, and by the 1950s the operation had outgrown its original facility, moving into a new, purpose-built plant at the Richter Street address that still anchors the winery today. It’s worth noting how narrow that survival window actually was — a company launched at the trough of the Great Depression, on borrowed money, selling a product half its own founding syndicate could barely keep solvent, had every reason to fold within its first five years the way so many similarly ambitious Depression-era ventures across the country did.
Under the Capozzi family’s continued stewardship through the 1950s and 60s, Calona pursued marketing and product strategies considerably more sophisticated than the company’s threadbare Depression-era beginnings might have suggested, and by the time Canadian and international trade rules tightened through NAFTA-era quality standards in the 1980s and 90s, Calona’s winemaking had evolved right alongside the rest of the province’s rapidly maturing industry. The winery weathered the broader shift in Canadian drinking preferences away from sweeter whites toward drier reds during that same stretch, expanding into barrel-fermented wines and a wider varietal range through the 1990s as consumer tastes and winemaking technique both matured in step with each other.
From a Swiss bankruptcy to a hockey legend’s name on the label
The winery’s ownership history took a more corporate turn later in the twentieth century, passing at one point into the hands of a Swiss parent company before that company’s eventual bankruptcy. In 2005, Andrew Peller Limited — an Ontario-based wine producer with its own roots tracing back to British Columbia, founded originally under the Andrés Wines name in Port Moody more than half a century ago — acquired Calona along with two related BC labels, Sandhill and Red Rooster, folding all three into what has since grown into one of the largest wine portfolios in the country.
The most consequential of those companion brands, in terms of reputation if not real estate, was Sandhill, launched in 1997 under founding winemaker Howard Soon as a dedicated single-vineyard, small-lot label — wines built specifically around individually identified vineyard blocks rather than the broader regional blending more typical of the era. Soon had actually joined the Calona team back in 1980, arriving after five years in the brewing industry, and by the time he launched Sandhill as its own distinct project seventeen years later, the concept was still genuinely novel for the Okanagan: rather than blending fruit from multiple sites into one consistent house style, every Sandhill wine would trace back to one specific, named vineyard block, letting the differences between sites speak for themselves rather than smoothing them out. Soon spent the better part of two decades building that reputation directly out of the same Richter Street facility, and in 2013 that work culminated in a substantial renovation of the site’s public-facing tasting space: an eight-thousand-square-foot addition built around soaring ceilings and eighty-year-old reclaimed timber beams, anchored by a large sculptural installation referencing the glacial geology that shaped the Okanagan Valley’s distinctive grape-growing conditions in the first place. Under Peller’s continued ownership, the address has since taken on yet another layer, now also producing wine under the Wayne Gretzky Okanagan label — a partnership between Peller and the hockey legend that extends a brand built first in Niagara out to the Okanagan, adding an unlikely but genuinely popular new chapter to a building whose earliest chapter involved staged telegrams and a future premier counting shares in mining-town hotel rooms.
The Calona name itself, remarkably, has never been retired through any of this — a detail that matters more than it might first appear, since BC’s wine industry has watched plenty of founding-era names quietly disappear once a corporate owner decided a rebrand made better commercial sense. One small, genuinely charming footnote to that survival: Greg Capozzi, a grandson of founder Cap Capozzi, has told the story of returning to his Vancouver school one September as a young boy and being asked, along with the rest of his class, to write an essay on how he’d spent the summer. He’d spent it visiting family in Kelowna, at the winery that shared his own name. His essay, apparently delivered with total sincerity, opened with the line: “I was in Calona.”
Today the Richter Street address functions less like a single winery and more like a small campus of related labels sharing one historic production facility and one shared retail floor — Calona’s own long-running VQA wines, Sandhill’s single-vineyard program, and the Wayne Gretzky Okanagan line all now move through the same building, a genuinely unusual arrangement even by the consolidated standards of the modern Canadian wine industry, where multiple distinct consumer-facing brands share a single production address and public tasting room rather than each maintaining a separate physical identity. It’s worth being honest about one thing here: Soon’s own departure from the winemaking team has, by the account of a fair number of regular visitors in recent years, coincided with a rockier stretch for Sandhill’s tasting-room reputation specifically — a reminder that a building’s history and a given brand’s current day-to-day experience are two separate things, and that the first doesn’t guarantee the second.
What “oldest continuously operating” actually means in BC wine
It’s worth pausing on that “oldest continuously operating” claim, since British Columbia wine history is dotted with earlier, less fortunate attempts that never made it to a second act. Winemaking in the Okanagan traces back further than Calona’s 1932 founding — Father Charles Pandosy is generally credited with planting some of the valley’s first grapevines in the 1860s as part of a Catholic mission near what’s now Kelowna, decades before anyone in the region was thinking commercially about wine at all. Giovanni Casorso, an Italian immigrant who worked alongside Pandosy’s mission, later became one of the valley’s genuine viticultural pioneers in his own right, and his son Charles planted what’s recognized as Kelowna’s first officially recorded vineyard in 1925. That planting eventually became the foundation for what today operates as Sperling Vineyards, a separate and still-active winery with its own direct lineage back to those Casorso family roots.
None of those earlier ventures, however, managed Calona’s specific feat: uninterrupted commercial operation from a single founding date through to the present day, weathering the Depression, a world war, multiple ownership transfers, and nearly a century of shifting Canadian taste without a single gap long enough to break the “continuously operating” claim. British Columbia’s wine industry has no shortage of once-prominent names that folded outright, restarted under new ownership after a genuine closure, or simply vanished during leaner decades. Calona’s unbroken run is less a marketing flourish than a genuinely rare survival story in an industry that has claimed plenty of ambitious competitors along the way.
The Okanagan’s deeper claim to the vine
Understanding why a winery took root in Kelowna specifically, rather than almost anywhere else on the continent, requires a brief detour into the valley’s underlying geology and climate — the same factors that eventually drew Ghezzi’s syndicate, and every winery that followed it, to this particular stretch of interior British Columbia. The Okanagan sits in a rain shadow cast by the Coast and Cascade mountain ranges to the west, producing a semi-arid climate with the kind of long, hot summer days and cool nights that reliably build both sugar and acidity in a ripening grape — conditions closer to parts of the Mediterranean or California’s Central Coast than to almost anywhere else in Canada. The valley’s namesake lake, glacially carved and running more than a hundred kilometres north to south, moderates temperature extremes along its shoreline benches, extending the growing season just enough to make commercial viticulture viable at a latitude that would otherwise seem far too far north for the task.
That combination of geology and climate is precisely why the region has, over the decades since Calona’s founding, grown from a single scrappy Depression-era winery into a recognized international wine appellation carrying its own VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance) designation — British Columbia’s formal quality assurance system, established to guarantee that a bottle labelled as Okanagan Valley wine actually meets defined regional and varietal standards rather than merely borrowing the valley’s increasingly valuable name. The VQA framework, administered by the BC Wine Authority, sets minimum standards around grape sourcing, permitted varieties, and sensory evaluation before a wine can legally carry the designation on its label — a formal quality bar that didn’t exist at all when Calona first began producing, and one the winery has operated under for decades since its introduction reshaped expectations across the entire province.
The grape that exists nowhere else
If the building itself is the winery’s most obvious claim to distinction, its most genuinely unusual one is a grape variety that, as far as commercial production goes, exists nowhere else on the planet. Sovereign Opal was developed by Agriculture Canada researchers in the 1970s, a deliberate cross of Maréchal Foch and Golden Muscat bred specifically to survive Okanagan winters while still producing an aromatic, distinctly perfumed white wine. It’s the only Canadian-bred wine grape variety that ever made it to full commercial release, and the first vintage, made at Calona in 1987 by winemaker Elias Phiniotis, launched a run that continues uninterrupted to this day.
What makes the variety’s story worth including here rather than filing away as mere trivia is who grows it: the grapes come exclusively from the Casorso family’s vineyards, the same Kelowna farming family whose earlier generations planted some of the valley’s first commercial vines back in the 1920s, decades before Calona existed at all. Roughly a dozen acres of Sovereign Opal, tended by the Casorsos to this day, supply the entire commercial market for the grape — no other winery anywhere grows it, and no other family has ever grown it for market. It’s a small, quietly remarkable loop connecting the valley’s earliest viticultural pioneers directly to its oldest surviving winery, more than ninety years after the two families’ respective stories both began within a few kilometres of each other.
One winery, one industry-wide pattern
Calona’s journey from independent Depression-era startup to one label among many inside a larger corporate portfolio isn’t an isolated story — it’s close to the default trajectory for nearly every founding-generation winery in the province that survived long enough to be worth acquiring. The Canadian wine industry, and British Columbia’s corner of it specifically, has spent the past two decades consolidating around a small number of large ownership groups, and Andrew Peller Limited is one of exactly two companies that now dominate that landscape, the other being Arterra Wines Canada, itself the product of an earlier wave of mergers and acquisitions among formerly independent Canadian and international producers.
Peller’s own expansion into the Okanagan illustrates the pattern clearly. Beyond the 2005 acquisition that brought Calona, Sandhill, and Red Rooster Winery under one roof, the company went on in 2017 to acquire three further well-regarded BC estates — Black Hills Estate Winery, Gray Monk Estate Winery, and Tinhorn Creek Vineyards — in a combined deal worth ninety-five million dollars, a transaction publicly framed at the time as investment in each winery’s existing culture and staff rather than a straightforward absorption into the parent company’s broader operations. Whether that framing holds up depends heavily on which specific label and which specific era one’s asking about; some acquired brands retain distinct winemaking teams and estate identities years after a sale, while others get folded more thoroughly into shared production facilities and centralized marketing. Calona’s own experience sits closer to the fully-integrated end of that spectrum, sharing both its physical building and, for stretches of the past two decades, parts of its winemaking team with its sister labels under the same roof.
None of this is unique to Peller, or to Kelowna, or even to Canada — it’s the same consolidation story playing out across wine regions worldwide, from Bordeaux négociant houses absorbing smaller chateaux to American conglomerates buying up boutique Napa labels one harvest at a time. What makes Calona’s specific version of that story worth telling in detail is simply how far back its own thread runs before the consolidation era ever began: nearly seventy-five years of fully independent operation, under three name changes and at least as many ownership structures, before a single acquisition ever touched it.
A building that keeps being rebuilt without ever closing
What ultimately distinguishes 1125 Richter Street from most historic commercial buildings still standing in a Canadian downtown core isn’t its age on its own — plenty of century-old buildings survive as museums, converted lofts, or empty shells waiting for their next use. What distinguishes it is that the building has never stopped doing the one thing it was built to do. It moved to this specific address in the 1950s as a purpose-built production facility, was substantially reimagined and expanded in 2013 without ever pausing production, and today houses not one but three distinct wine labels operating under one roof and one shared retail floor, open to the public daily for tastings year-round.
Few addresses anywhere in Canadian food and beverage history can claim that particular kind of continuity — not preserved behind glass, not converted into something else entirely. The building at 1125 Richter Street is still, in 2026, turning Okanagan grapes into wine under a name a public contest handed a struggling syndicate nearly ninety years ago. That’s the whole story, really, stripped of the telegram theatrics and the corporate reshuffling: a company that should have folded within its first five years simply never got around to it.
Historical details in this piece draw on BC wine industry records, contemporary reporting on Andrew Peller Limited’s Okanagan acquisitions, and published accounts of Calona Vineyards’ founding era. Current hours, tasting offerings, and label availability at 1125 Richter Street should be confirmed directly, since the site’s retail programming has changed multiple times over the past decade and is likely to continue evolving.