MEET YOU THERE The Art of Gelato

BY PAULA E. KIRMAN

SOMETIMES IT TAKES a fire to launch a cool new chapter in a family’s life. Case in point is Yvonne and Johannes Irnich, a couple originally from Germany whose livelihoods were attached to working at a construction company. When a facility they were working on burned down, it seemed their livelihoods also went up in flames.

As fate would have it, the Irnich household were looking for a career change and the incident made that switch more timely. Yvonne had learned how to make gelato as a teen from an Italian gelatiere and was pondering the prospects of going at it full-time. “He taught me all the secrets and what is needed to make the best tasting gelato with foods that are pure and natural. I absolutely embraced this art of creating endless possibilities of flavors,” she said on the company’s website.

Irnich lamented that she could not find a gelato here in Canada on the same

level as the kind she knew in Europe. With the support of her family, she put together a sales trailer, a small gelato kitchen, and a used batch freezer. From its humble beginnings in 2015 at the St. Albert Farmers’ Market, the enterprise—dubbed DaVinci— benefited from word-of-mouth and within a year, enjoyed national distribution.

Son Felix Irnich is the chief operating officer who founded DaVinci together with his mother. In doing so, he left behind his university studies at MacEwan University, where he was taking commerce and computer science. Father Johannes was still doing some construction, but joined soon after.

“Our goal for the gelato was to bring quality,” says Felix. “We personally felt there was no good gelato in the country when we started DaVinci. We wanted to bring a good gelato like we knew in Germany, at a price people can afford.”

The company name was chosen because it represents the style of gelato the family wanted to make. “Gelato is Italian, so we wanted something Italian. Da Vinci is an artist, representing creativity. And, everyone knows who he is.”

DaVinci’s gelato is available as pints in retail locations and served in restaurants across the country, including Famoso Neapolitan Pizzeria and Sorrentino’s. The gelato is made completely from scratch, using no artificial flavours, colours, or premixes. All of their gelato is gluten-free with the dairy varieties made from 100 percent Canadian milk and cream. The sorbettos are completely vegan.

DaVinci makes 20 flavours regularly to keep shelves and restaurants stocked. Felix lists DaVinci’s most popular flavours as vanilla, Belgian chocolate, and strawberry lemonade. Other bestsellers include pistachio, containing pistachios from the Mediterranean, as well as dairy-free coconut, made with coconut milk instead of cow milk. “And you can’t go wrong with some good, old salted caramel,” he says.

However, if you’re looking for variety, DaVinci has 120 flavours in stock, including ones that are off the beaten track like blueberry-basil, honey-anise and lavender. What set DaVinci products from its competition is its use of natural ingredients, says Felix.

“A lot of the gelato you buy commercially or cheaper use premixes, powders, and artificial flavours,” he adds. “When you have our gelato—for example, our strawberry lemonade sorbetto—it’s lemons, strawberries, some sugar… there’s no stabilizers and it is a more natural product. If you look at the calories, it isn’t bad compared to other products. It will have some fibre, which is good for digestion, and it has actual fruit. It’s handcrafted, properly made, very smooth and creamy. Some stuff out there can be icy and chunky. Ours is smooth and pleasant.”

For adults wanting their gelato with a kick, the company has rolled out a Happy Hour gelato line from red wine gelator to a peach chardonnay sorbetto, each with an alcohol content of five percent. DaVinci sought going the boozy route since the beginning but AGLC regulations didn’t cover gelato, prompting the company to change much of its setup.

One major restructuring involved creating T-Rex Distillery in 2019. “One of the requirements was that we had to make our own spirits,” Felix explains. “We couldn’t go buy wine and dump it in—we had to make our own.” Owning a distillery provided a huge opportunity for the company when the pandemic hit. After getting a license from Health Canada, T-Rex produced thousands of bottles of alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

But COVID-19 hasn’t deterred DaVinci from making gelato from ingredients grown by local farmers and selling to markets in the region. “We still try to make new flavours and we try to find those really good ones to share with people,” says Felix. “We want to make gelato that is just really damn tasty.” t8n

2 Rayborn Crescent, St. Albert 587-686-0288 davinci-gelato.com trexdistillery.ca

BY GLORIA LOITZ

UNLIKE THE ALBERTA capital that opts for the grid system of numbered streets and avenues, St. Albert individualizes each street with proper nouns of historical people who had a profound impact on this city. In particular, St. Albert’s northwest quadrant maintains that system by choosing vanguards from original settlers to prominent members of the clergy who worked in this region.

Government surveyor, M. Deane (his first name conspicuously absent from records) arrived in St. Albert in 1882 and completed his official river lot survey of the area in 1883. Deane’s work solidified lot sizes and borders, a boon to the establishment of independent farms.

Six years after Quebec-born Father Alphonse Desmarais entered the Oblate order in 1878, he was sent to northern missions where he founded and

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developed many western missions in Alberta. He was known as “the Missionary Giant” and passed away in 1940.

Métis settler Antoine Dion helped build the first chapel in St. Albert. He arrived in St. Albert with Father Lacombe in 1861 and is documented in early church records until 1900 as a farmer residing just east of St. Albert.

Mary Cross Dover was one of the founders of the Calgary Stampede. She was also a rancher and a business woman who joined the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, which led her to the United Kingdom in 1942. In 1943 she was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and given command of Canada’s largest C.W.A.C. centre in Kitchener, Ontario.

Two brothers, Edmond and Frank Juneau, both started farms in St. Albert in 1878. Edmond married and had 14 children, one of whom was named after his wife, Marie, recognized as the oldest living resident in St. Albert back in 1985.

The Labelle family arrived in St. Albert in 1916. Aldoma Labelle, who was also a member of the Town Council, opened up a butcher shop in 1922 and continued to run the store for the next 30 years.

Details are fuzzy about this street, but it was possibly named after Forunat and Amanda Lachance who, along with their nine children, arrived in St. Albert in 1943. They had seven more children after buying land near Guy, Alberta and many of their 36 grandchildren are still settled in the Edmonton and St. Albert areas.

Joseph Lafranchise was an early Albertan newspaper publisher and printer. He and his wife Rosanna moved to St. Albert in 1912 and started the bilingual paper the St. Albert Star. The family also operated the St. Albert Post Office from 1915 to 1945.

Lucien Boudreau co-owned the Astoria Hotel. His stature of only five feet tall and his political accomplishments probably earned him the nickname the Little Napoleon of St. Albert, who won seats in the 1909, 1913 and 1917 Legislative Assembly.

This road was known as St. Hippolyte Street until 1957 when then City overhauled the street names to have each

moniker in the district start with the same initial letter. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate were heavily involved in the early development of St. Albert and the name Madonna Drive is in homage to that history.

Father Felix Marchand was born in France in 1859 and was ordained an Oblate priest in 1883 by Vital Grandin, Bishop of St. Albert. He served the Métis and Indigenous people until his murder in 1885 by Big Bear and his band during the Riel Rebellion in what would become known as the Frog Lake Massacre.

This street name was inspired by festive spirit. Natalia is Latin for “Christmas Child.” t8n

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