KELOWNA, B.C. – A former cowboy and a woman who grew up on a Saskatchewan farm are producing a brand of wine-fed beef named after an Egyptian god.
Sezmu Meats, named for the god of wine, was born after Janice Ravndahl of West Kelowna, B.C., watched the cooking showThe F Word,in which hell-raising chef Gordon Ramsay fed beer to pigs.
She called her brother, Darrel Timm, on the family beef farm near Kinistino, Sask., and asked if they could feed beer to their cattle.
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He said no.
What about wine?
This time he said yes, experimented and developed the feeding protocol: a litre of red wine per animal per day for 90 days, which is the equivalent of humans drinking a glass of wine per day. Timm chose red wine because of the tannins.
“One of our friends, Michael Allemeier, is a well-known Canadian chef, and we gave him some of the beef and he loved it,” Ravndahl said.
On sezmumeats. com, the former executive chef at Mission Hill Estate Winery and the host ofCook Like a Chefis quoted as saying: “I have cooked with almost all of the premium beef programs, and I have been impressed with the Sezmu beef.… Red wine and beef are a natural pairing partners – why not in the finishing program.”
Ravndahl and Timm developed the meat for their personal use but decided to market it because the result was better than they expected.
“Because they were fed B.C. wine, it made sense to move the operation to B. C, use B.C. cattle and have a British Columbia product,” Ravndahl said.
She went looking for a cattle producer with a big imagination and found Bill Freding, who owns a feedlot near Oliver, B.C.
“Bill has one of the best reputations in the business,” Ravndahl said.
“I saw his feedlots and was so impressed that I was sold right there. It was a natural fit.”
Freding’s Southern Plus Feedlots is a 7,000-head operation that sells all his beef to the U.S. market.
“We have the best-treated cattle in the world, just about: large pens, dry, virtually no mud problems and quite spacious, about 150 sq. feet per head,” Freding said.
“We do low-stress handling of cattle and I think the wine calms them down a bit, so the meat should be more tender because there is no stress in their life.”
Freding has eaten a lot of beef, but he was impressed when he sampled a Sezmu rib-eye steak.
“It was at the Watermark Hotel in Osoyoos. It was certainly an impressive cut of meat and we had lots of comments from local people about how good the meat was.”
Food and wine writer Sid Cross, the only Canadian inducted as a Membre d’Honneur of the L’Academie du vin de Bordeaux and a recipient of the Society of Bacchus America’s gourmet of the year award, was also impressed when he tried the meat at a dinner at Government House in Victoria.
“I was in L.A. last month presenting a lifetime achievement award on behalf of the Society of Bacchus to chef Wolfgang Puck,” Cross said.
“As one of his hosted functions at Cut in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, he served Wagyu North American against Wagyu Kobe. Your product is in that same class, Janice.”
In Japan, Wagyu cows are fed organic grain, Japanese beer and sake mash, and the beef is an expensive delicacy.
Scientists are also interested in analyzing Sezmu meat. The grain-fed Angus cows that carry the Sezmu brand will be going under the microscope this winter as researchers at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., investigate the effects of the wine-fed diet.
“We feel there is less methane produced,” Freding said. “They will do tests on the meat compared to normal beef, measure omega 3s and see what the effect is on E. coli. There is literature that suggests some of the ingredients of the wine will mitigate E. coli replication.”
Ravndahl and her partners are now planning to expand into Ontario using Ontario cattle and wine.
“We did write a business plan,” Ravndahl said. “Then, we rewrote it, and we just rewrote it again. It’s definitely been a learning process and things have changed as we have learned.”
