Open That Bottle

...with Darren Oleksyn

BY LINDA GARSON PHOTO BY DONG KIM

Some careers follow a long and winding road; Darren Oleksyn had a clear idea of what he wanted to do, and stayed the course - and it's been successful for him.

Growing up in east Saskatchewan, his father was a teacher whose pastime was making fruit wine. “He saw wine as a challenge, so he would try to make it out of anything he could think of,” says Oleksyn. “His raspberry wine was pretty good, but his green tomato and celery wine was not so good.”

His father started making at-home kits, and after finishing university, Oleksyn started making them too, with wine always on the go in his cellar.

Oleksyn’s goal was to be a sports reporter: “I love sports, but I wasn't a good enough athlete to actually play it,” he says. He liked writing and decided to try it: two years of pre-journalism and two years of journalism at Regina University, finishing in 1990. His dream came true when he landed a position covering sports at a weekly paper in Estevan, and then at a daily newspaper in Prince Albert. “Then I discovered that when you cover sports, you don't have a social life, because you're always working nights.”

Tiring of sports, he became a general reporter and copy editor, being promoted to managing editor and city editor, before moving to Regina in 1998 to work at the Leader Post. “I was a copy editor there, so worked nights, and it was a great job; I knew Regina, my family was close, but my wife and I wanted to move to a bigger city, and in 2004 an opportunity came up at the Calgary Herald.”

Oleksyn worked in the newsroom as copy editor, a night supervisor part-time, and then assignment editor. At the Herald he met Shelley Boettcher, and they were both wine lovers, so when she left to work at Wine Access and an opening arose, he moved there too. “I took an introduction to wine course at at Willow Park (Wines & Spirits), and that really got me into it. I was trying to learn everything I could. I took WSET II and WSET III courses, and our vacations would be to wine country. The more you know, the more you know that you don't know, and you just want to keep learning,” says Oleksyn.

In his position as Managing Editor, his big project was producing the Canadian Wine Annual, a reference magazine of all the wineries in Canada, and the wine awards that they used to do. “When it closed down, I did a little bit of work at the Herald, and ended up writing a wine book with Shelley - Uncorked in Alberta.”

Back at the Herald full time in 2013, Oleksyn managed special projects and starting his wine column, and has been doing that ever since. “My wife loves wine too; sometimes our palates are complementary and sometimes they're conflicting, and it's fun that way. She seems to have a sense of picking out the most expensive wine when we go to events - so that can be good and bad.”

So what bottle is Oleksyn saving for a special occasion?

When he took the class at Willow Park, they tasted wines and always got a discount, so Oleksyn started buying wine. “Back then Bordeaux was a lot cheaper, so I used to buy the odd bottle and I did some futures buying. That stopped around 2009 when the prices skyrocketed,” he explains. “I like sweet wine; I don't drink a ton of it, but it’s fascinating. A lot of people probably don't even know that they make a sweet wine in Bordeaux.”

“It takes a special situation to be able to make a wine like this Chateau Guiraud Sauternes, so I picked it up. I have small bottles of different vintages, but 2005 was a great vintage, so I bought a bigger bottle. I keep thinking I'm going to open it, but maybe I'll wait until it’s 20 years old in 2025 and open it on my birthday. We'll probably have a party and open some other nice wines too. It'll be a fun experience, so I'll make sure I have my favourite wine friends with me too.”