Articles - Horseshoe Found Winery

John Schreiner on wine

Horseshoe Found releases two new wines

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Horseshoe Found Winery at Cawston in the Similkameen Valley, which opened last year, does not have a tasting room. However, don’t be deterred from making an appointment to visit. Pavel and Michaela Horak, the owners, are a charming, down-to-earth couple, hardly the sort to throw visitors off the property. It is just that it is not practical for such a tiny, two-person winery to man a tasting room. Horseshoe Found is one of British Columbia’s smallest wineries. In the 2020 vintage, the winery made 4,500 litres of wine, the minimum allowed under a winery license. Don’t look for the winery to get much bigger. “No, we will not do that because we would like to stay small, and maintain production between 4,500 litres and 6,000 litres, so we can focus on the quality of what we would like to do,” Pavel says. A check of the website provides the addresses of wine shops and restaurants that stock Horseshoe Found wines. Because the wines qualify for VQA, you might even find some in the Save-On-Foods wine shops.

Horseshoe Found: A Delightful Similkameen Surprise

Horseshoe Found is more than worth a detour, especially if you’re Similkameen bound. We ‘found’ Horseshoe Found thanks to a tip from nearby Orofino, where we’d just enjoyed an idyllic tasting. As we were leaving we asked, “What’s new” and were directed a little further east along Upper Bench Road, then right on Lowe. I love the ties that bind this spectacular valley, where everyone really pulls together to help their neighbours. A proverbial labour of love, Horseshoe Found is tucked into the half-basement of a house on the slope that leads from Upper Bench to Hwy 3. It’s the work of Michaela and Pavel Horak. And by ‘work’, I mean just that. Except for some harvest help, the couple handles every task themselves, including farming their three acre vineyard. Michaela suggests to us that Horseshoe Found is the smallest (licensed) winery in the province. And, as we taste between the few tanks and barrels, we’re pretty sure she’s right.

Canadian Wine Insider – January 2022

It seems that owners Pavel and Michaela Horak are relying on more than horseshoes to succeed with their micro-winery located in Cawston. Of Czech descent, they bought the land in 2006 and started from scratch, planting and tending by hand, and farming by organic principles. They opened the winery in 2020. They have planted viognier, gewurztraminer and morio muskat, with white bottlings being blends thereof. The only red is an interesting, evolved Horseshoe Found Pinot Noir 2018, which captured a silver medal at the 2021 NWACs. At a recent WineAlign tasting in Toronto, I was intrigued by the direction of their whites—White Horsehoe 2020, White Muse 2020 and MuscGewurz 2019—each aromatic, yet rich and dry, and very much in a tradition of central European winemaking. A very earnest property that adds to B.C.’s diversity—much as Joie Farm did in the 2000s.