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Trade Talk: Sisters find calling in cider business

Left Field Cider: Beverage made at Rey Creek Ranch

The 106-year-old Empress hotel will receive a $40-million refurbishment over the next four years.

BUSINESS LUNCH: Sisters Kate Garthwaite and Theresa Pedersen expected to lunch Monday at Bestie. The Chinatown eatery serves the Little Dry and Big Dry ciders their Left Field Co. produces alongside 1,200-head of cattle at the family’s 4,850-hectare Rey Creek Ranch between Merrit and Logan Lake.

Instead, the two crossed Pender Street for New Town’s steam buns and hot-and-sour soup. That classic broth is the opposite of the 30,000 litres of cider their 2,600-square-foot will output in 2014.

“We didn’t expect to grow as quickly as we did,” said Kate, predicting 50,000 litres next year.

With a UBC degree in global resource systems, Garthwaite was a fundraiser at the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation. UVic commerce grad and varsity-squad volleyball centre Pedersen became a Calgary stockbroker and, in 2007, moved to Nassau, Bahamas, with husband and investment banker Leith. Always fond of cider, Garthwaite took courses with U of Washington’s Peter Mitchell, got rancher-parents Gord and Deb to buy an apple press, quit her job, moved to Ross on Wye, England, and learned the game at Mike Johnson’s Broome Farm firm.

Vacationing there in fall, 2010, her parents and sister caught the cider bug, formed a private limited partnership, got a manufacturer’s licence a year later “and started pressing apples the next day,” Kate said.

Eager to see more grafts of English and French cider apples, Kate and Theresa are full-time cider makers who undertake all the production, selling and delivery of 500-ml bottles that fetch $8 to $9 in private stores. Maybe they’ll join a craft-beverage trend and distill Calvados-style apple brandy. Meanwhile, with Left Field’s market expanding, Kate is pleased to have parental approval: “My Dad is a farmer, an entrepreneur. He was happy that I wasn’t staying in non-profit.”

TWIST OF FATE: Jack Senior’s first entrepreneurial investment entailed a three-speed bike. Seven decades later, it resulted in the VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation receiving $6,014,000. As for the bike, Senior (whose father died when Senior was seven) took newspaper, butcher and other delivery routes to help the family’s $20 monthly rent for an Ash-at-20th house. He got $1.50 from hospital patients for 76-cents-worth of Vancouver Suns. When the Province vendor’s faster bike reduced his take, “I bought a three-speed and got there first.”

When another after-school job as the Park theatre’s doorman taught him the value of pre-popped popcorn, he joined Seattle-based Harland Fairbanks, built a provincewide market and, during a cash-flow crunch, took shares instead of salary. When another buyer planned to oust him, he quietly pointed out that he was the business and would open up the next day, whereupon their corn would be well and truly popped.

Engaged to Elly Rosemeyer, he paid $15,500 for a westside house that sold for $1.2 million in 2012. In 1955, he paid $49,5000 for “a little wooden box” on the Point Grey Road waterfront off Larch Street. Don Mattrick and Nanon Gaspe de Beaubien’s neighbouring house on a slightly narrower lot reportedly fetched over $14 million recently.

“Some of the best money I’ve ever spent is on legal and accounting,” Senior said. He meant Lyall Knott and Mark Elliott, whose father Gordon was his pal at Edith Cavell elementary. They’ve seen him develop a 50-per-cent stake in Speedy Gourmet Ltd. into 49 other restaurants, of which he retains 14 Dairy Queen-Orange Julius Treat Centres, two straight Orange Julius outlets and one DQ Express. His Senior Enterprises Inc, now a trust, owns several commercial properties in Vancouver, plus interests in warehouses retained when he sold Harland Fairbanks to Premium Brands. He, Andre Molnar and various limited partners have condo-property interests in Washington state, and continue to develop rental projects in Nanaimo. He sold 275 feet of West Fourth Avenue frontage to Cressey Development Groups for $6 million.

Senior took a $3-million bath on his L’Arena restaurant in the Vancouver Public Library main branch and sensed another after buying a Rolls-Royce: “The staff wanted raises, the suppliers put their prices up. So I phoned [the dealer] and said: ‘I want my Volvo back.’”

No such contretemps, apparently, with the seven yachts he’s owned, including the present Meridian 540 Pilot House. “My wife loved that boat,” he said wistfully of Elly, who died recently after they’d cruised the Atlantic coast, Caribbean and the Pacific to Alaska.

Given his own two heart attacks and the conviction that seven-years-younger Elly would long outlive him, he assigned a life-insurance policy on her, which is why the VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation is suddenly the richer and Senior suddenly the poorer.

CLEAR TO GO: Nat and Flora Bosa’s purchase of Victoria’s Empress hotel June 27 came out of left field, too. Unknown is vendor Ivanhoé Cambridge’s price for the 106-year-old landmark that GSE Holdings head Graham Lee reportedly passed on last year. However, the Bosas will spend another $40 million renovating its entrance, lobby, public spaces and many of the 477 guest rooms. Not mentioned is a grappa bar, although Nat Bosa’s birth on Christmas Day, 1944 (thus the name Natale) warrants one. Congested lungs promised the baby’s imminent death. But a boozy neighbour put his grappa-dipped pinky in Nat’s mouth, and the subsequent violent coughing cleared the obstruction and kept the future development mogul alive.

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