Hugo Bonjean

“Why do people have to pay for food?”

Hugo Bonjean’s seven-year-old son asked him that at the height of his career — and he had no answer. Belgian-born, with an MBA from European University, Hugo held executive positions with Fortune 500 hotel companies, developed hotels across Europe and the Americas, explored more than fifty countries, and did business with some of the wealthiest people on earth. On those same trips, he spent his evenings with friends in the slums of Chile and Brazil. The distance between those two worlds became the question of his life.

He almost didn’t live to answer it. In his mid-thirties, doctors found a tumor that, by their account, should have killed him a decade earlier — and gave him little chance of surviving the operation. He lived. In a second surgery he went further, and came back. The near-death experience changed his life. A man who has died a little values a successful but meaningless career differently. Hugo walked away.

The family had settled in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in 1997. After the surgeries, Hugo traded the boardroom for the pen, and together they learned to live off the land — growing their own food, keeping bees, following the seasons. Nine years of writing and storytelling produced three novels — In the Eyes of Anahita, Seeds …of Germination or Termination, and A People’s Power — that became Canadian bestsellers, sold hand to hand through multiple printings — the first two taught in Canadian universities and high schools.

Then the land offered a chapter no one expected. Descended from a long line of French winemakers, Hugo turned the foothills’ wildflowers and nectar into the Spirit Hills flower winery, the first winery in the world to craft wine from all flower ingredients. His flower wines reached Michelin-starred tables in Europe. When the pandemic closed everything, he and his wife took themselves off the payroll so that no employee would lose a job. Nearly broke, they found new investors and started the Florvino Flower Winery in Texas, carrying flower wine and its story across America.

Hugo writes to move people to question the world, think for themselves, and live consciously. His newsletter, Good People (on Substack), continues the conversation. He lives in Texas, USA, and Alberta, Canada — much of the year on the road, telling this story one room at a time.