BCBusiness

October 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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Putting the focus on ingredients rather than a strictly size- or volume-based de"nition places a small-batch producer such as Victoria Spirits—which produces around 7,000 litres a year from its family- run microdistillery on Vancouver Island but gets its NGS from Ontario—in the same category as multina- tional Diageo, which produces¤6.5 billion litres of spirits from more than 100 sites in 30 countries. For Victoria Spirits or Vancouver's Long Table Distillery, which also produces around 7,000 litres a year, the devil in those details is having a big impact on the bottom line. Currently distilleries de"ned as craft can keep 100 per cent of the proceeds from sales in their tasting rooms and can sell directly to restaurants without paying a markup to the LDB; microdistillers that don't qualify have to pay a 161 per cent markup. Charles Tremewen, who opened his award-winning Long Table Distillery in February 2013, just prior to the B.C. government's new craft policy, says the new rules are enough to give him pause. "If we knew then what we know now, would we rethink our model? Maybe." Despite attracting some vocal opposition from industry, John Yap, B.C.'s parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General—and the man responsible for the province's liquor policy reform—argues that the new rules have been good for B.C.'s economy. "We've seen huge increases in the number of entrepreneurs in the sector of the distillery business and it's a sector that has a lot of potential, with new channels to reach customers like selling spirits at farmers' markets," he says. But the craft designation, he adds, is here to stay: "My expectation is that there will be an opportunity to look at a VQA-like designa- tion in the future and that will be the opportunity to consult with the industry. However, the bottom line is the revenue ‚ow to the province has to stay the same." 78 BCBusiness OctOber 2015

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