Podcast 133 – Oooyster Festival 2013

Photo by Amber Goodwin

The Okanagan is turning into Festival Valley. The seasonal Wine Festivals have been going on for quite a while and the Penticton Jazz festival has been around too. But lately it seems that there are now more things than ever popping up and now the “busy season,” which used to be May-24 to early October, is getting extended on both ends and seriously diversifying. (Look for the first Food and Wine Film Festival later this year…)

The new official kick-off to the season involves oysters in Oliver and Osoyoos. Lots of oysters and a lot of towns that start with the letter ‘O’. That is how the Oooyster Festival got its branding last year in the first incarnation that featured dinners, tastings, and events. This year, the 2nd annual, ramped it up a notch or two. More events, more locations, more people, and way more oysters.

Being that Oooyster Fest is happening in wine country, it seemed only natural that there should be some kind of a wine competition. (Wine making folk can be competitive sometimes. They always say they aren’t, but they are. Really. Ask them.) This year, a group of judges assembled to taste their way through the Canadian Oyster Wine Competition where wines would be judged on how well they paired with oysters.

This podcast is a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the competition itself, featuring rare, never-before-heard audio footage of wine judges judging. The slurping you will hear is actual wine. Do not adjust your iPods.

(A few oysters were harmed in the making of this podcast. But, they were yummy.)

Photo by Amber Goodwin

Photo by Amber Goodwin

Photo by Amber Goodwin

 

Kaleden Gets a 3rd Winery

I drove past a sign for a new winery the other day. New wineries always catch my eye and this one will be catching lots of people’s eyes, especially if they are driving from Vancouver on Route 3A towards Penticton. Accordin to their website, they have been growing grapes for 17 years and have stopped selling their grapes in order to make wine for themselves beginning with the 2012 vintage. So far there are only 3 whites (Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Gewurztaminer) and a rosé available but the website promies reds will be available when they are ready.

It’s amazing that Kaleden had only 2 wineries previously, and that is really only a recent thing. Kraze Legz was the first to open and Top Shelf came later. There are lots of little vineyards scattered throughout this sloping community between Penticton and Okanagan Falls and I’d be surprised if we didn’t see a few more boutique operations opening up in the coming years.

There is a whole new crop of wineries coming online at this time of year. Spring is when many of them can get their first wines to market, usually whites unless they have been holding reds from previous vintages. This time of year is always exciting that way and I look forward to more discoveries as the BC wine horizon expands yet again.

Have you seen any new wineries that you hadn’t noticed before? Share them here in the comments below.

Happy wine touring!

~Luke

 

The Count Down Begins – Where the action is

The countdown is on to the 6th Annual Wine Bloggers Conference in Penticton, BC. This is where the BC industry in the Okanagan valley can really show the world what they can do.

If you have been following the BC Wine 101 podcasts featuring many of the wine regions in the Okanagan Valley, then you will notice that there may be a few regions missing. I am very much hoping to get Naramata involved in the coming weeks and that will likely be the very last podcast in that series. The idea was to get this series completed before the Wine Bloggers Conference and then leave it at that for now.

For people who have been following the wine industry in BC over the last decade or two, you will notice that some of the more historic wineries and locations are not included in this series. Venerable estates like Summerhill, Cedar Creek, and St. Hubertus, or the “Fab 5 Wineries” east of Kelowna are not included. Neither are the northern wineries like Gray Monk, Arrowleaf, or Larch Hills. There are a few reasons for this and I’d like to address them for the record because I’ve never wanted to deliberately exclude any winery on this podcast/blog and it’s important to me.

Firstly, the Wine Bloggers Conference is coming to Penticton and the wine regions in BC Wine 101 are the ones that are closer to Penticton than anything else. There is a pre-conference excursion that will visit Tantalus and other wineries in that area, but the bulk of the action is going to be focused on these southern Okanagan wine regions. Having been to 2 conferences previously, there is only so far that we can go for an excursion and the organizers have set those limits for a reason.

Secondly, regional representation wasn’t there. The fact is that when I wanted to chat with someone about the wineries of the Similkameen, Okanagan Falls, or any of the featured regions, there were organizations in place to receive those requests. There were people who had been hired or contracted to act on behalf of the wineries in those regions. Did that make a difference to the organizers of the conference? I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. I know that I found it generally quite easy to get interviews and chat about the wine regions.

And thirdly, (and most shocking in a way, especially for people like me who have followed the industry closely for years) the wine industry is no longer centred about Kelowna. The real action is in the south. A quick glance at the Lt. Governor’s Award winners from its decade-long existence will show that the most northern winning winery in 2012 was Thornhaven in Summerland. Maybe it’s just the recent vintages, but earlier awards always had strong showings from Sandhill, Cedar Creek, and other grand estates in the Kelowna area. Maybe that’s a sign of things to come? Who knows?

When I started this series, I was hoping that I would be able to get all of the wineries in the Okanagan represented on record for that they do best. It just wasn’t possible within the small scope (and no budget) of my podcast and that really got me thinking about how this industry has changed. I still want to talk about the wineries on Camp Creek road and the glorious rieslings near Kelowna. I want to chat biodynamics, Leed certification, and Pinot Noir until the cows come home. The story of BC wine really begins with a lot of these properties and I really believe that the story of BC Wine 101 begins here.

But the question of representation remains and not just for media oeno-nerds like me. When the subject of sub-appellations really starts to build (and it will), who will be there to represent the regions that may have some of the most unique terroir out there? My guess is that it will be in the south.

 

Podcast 132 – The Wineries of Bottleneck Drive and Summerland

Welcome to BC Wine 101, where I will focus in on a different wine region in each episode for anyone who is interested in learning about BC wine, including the wine bloggers who will be traveling to Penticton for the Wine Bloggers Conference coming up in June.

You can listen online here or download our podcast on iTunes.

Summerland is a great little town. I say that not because I grew up there (I didn’t), but I did live there for a short time when I first relocated to the Okanagan Valley. There’s an energy here that isn’t like other towns in the valley. The landscape around Summerland is extremely dynamic. There are wide valleys, high mountains, lakeshores, deep canyons, and huge silt bluffs all within town limits. And the most amazing part is that the town is located inside the remains of an extinct volcano. But that’s another story.

There are a lot of wineries here and they are all very close together. You can see a lot of terrain and try a lot of wine here on a lot of different patios all with remarkably different views. Straight roads do not happen in Summerland. There are more S-curves and wineries that start with the letter “S” than anywhere else in BC.

Bottleneck Drive represents the majority of wineries in this region and have a good track record for putting on a great show as an organization. The Light Up the Vines festival held each year in November really gets the holidays started with a series of tours through the participating wineries. (Check out Podcasts 94 and 95 for interviews from the 2011 edition.)

I’ve always enjoyed my visits to wineries in Summerland and have made the wineries here destinations for over 10 years now. Even living in the south Okanagan as I do, I always enjoy making special trip to Summerland just to visit a particular winery or to track down a particular bottle of wine. It all happens there.

The wineries of Bottleneck Drive:

Bonitas Winery	Dirty Laundry Vineyards	Greata Ranch
Heaven’s Gate Winery	Okanagan Crush Pad	Thornhaven Estates Winery
Saxon Estate Winery	Sleeping Giant Fruit Winery	Sonoran Estate Winery
Silkscarf Winery	Sumac Ridge Estate Winery	Valentine Farm

Other wineries in Summerland:

8th Generation Vineyards

Summergate Winery

 

The True Local Experience

I’ve done something (twice now) in the last 5 months that is completely different from what I used to do. It’s not something I planned, it was on a whim. It was an idea that I found on twitter. And, I’m pretty sure, if I had not become interested in wine, I might not have ever ordered any. Twice.

Getting into the wine industry and learning about it has really opened my eyes to buying locally, supporting the independent producer, and not just buying things purely for convenience or price. I now tend to prefer the taste of wines that are unique in some way and I don’t mind if they aren’t exactly the same year to year. I’m almost drawn to buying wines that I know are only available in the wine shop. I like knowing that the fruit that I eat doesn’t have to travel half way around the world just to get to a huge supermarket. Pears aren’t in season in February, that’s why I eat the ones that my wife canned last August.

This past Christmas, I wanted to see if I could get all my shopping done without visiting a mall or a big box. Except for a trip to get things for someone else, I succeeded in avoiding the mall and never went near a big box store at all. The best special treat though was an online order that I placed for an upstart BC business that was the talk of my family’s holidays.

Enter Samantha’s Chocopops. Samantha Richard from Victoria, BC has been creating chocolate treats as a home-based business since last fall. I saw her on Twitter and was immediately taken by her avatar. It’s a photo of her holding up a plate full of her chocolates on lollipop sticks (chocopops – get it?) beautifully wrapped in cello with ribbons. It was the best business avatar I’d ever seen on twitter. So of course, I tweeted her about it.

It was only a matter of time before I placed my order for some Christmas themed chocopops and a tin of candy cane chocolate bark. I’m not a big candy cane fan but my wife and kids love them. I placed the order and stealthily picked up the box when it arrived a week later, hiding it in my office until Christmas morning when I would bring them out as a surprise after our Christmas dinner. The family loved them because they were tasty and unique. It was a hit! They’d never had anything like it before and I enjoyed telling them the story of how I found them.

I ordered again for Easter, figuring that perhaps the Easter Bunny should probably support local producers as well. The result was the same – sheer awe over the incredible look and taste of chocolate bark with mini-eggs and sprinkles. It wasn’t only the kids’ eyes that popped out of their heads, it was the adults as well.

I’ve started to seek out other local businesses whenever I can. When I need a quick lunch in Penticton, instead of going to a big fast-food place, I’ll head to Burger 55, where I can get burgers with cilantro, roasted garlic, sprouts, or any of the other 50 or so options on the ordering clipboards. When we don’t have wine for dinner, my wife likes cider, which we get from Orchard Hill in Oliver or Wards in Kelowna. And it’s not just food. I bought a pair of riding gloves for my motorcycle at a local leather shop, Harleywood Leather in Okanagan Falls.

Is it cheaper to buy local? Not always. Is the quality better? I like to think so but it’s hard to generalize about that. I tend to think that small producers of whatever product out there will want to sell things that will stand out somehow. If they can’t beat the big boxes with lower prices, they can certainly beat them on quality and customer service so a successful local business will likely focus on those aspects.

The biggest thing about buying local is that it adds another level to the whole experience. If I’d bought a couple big chocolate Easter bunnies for $3 each from some big retailer instead of ordering from Samantha’s Chocopops, would the experience have been the same? Hardly. I would never have had a twitter conversation or email exchange with London Drugs the way I did with Samantha’s Chocopops. I wouldn’t have much of a story to tell about where the chocolates came from, or who made them, or any of the story about how I first heard about them.

It’s those experiences that I think people are drawn to when they tour wine country and that’s what I think I’ve transferred over to my non-wine-buying life. Everyday, I meet people traveling through wine country buying wines here and there. They could certainly get most of the same bottles in the aisles of a liquor store, but this time they are here, in wine country. Why? I think that it’s for the experience of bringing home a bottle, opening it up at dinner, and telling their dinner companions about what a great time they have at “Local Winery A.” Maybe they did a tour and this was a special wine that was only available in the wine shop? Maybe they saw the tanks where this wine was made? Maybe they saw the actual vines where the grapes were grown? That’s a far more memorable and interesting experience than wandering around a liquor store looking for a wine.

Isn’t that what makes life that much more interesting?

 

Podcast 131 – BC Wine 101 The West Side Wine Trail

Mount Boucherie, at the center of the West Side Wine Trail

Welcome to BC Wine 101, where I will focus in on a different wine region in each episode for anyone who is interested in learning about BC wine, including the wine bloggers who will be traveling to Penticton for the Wine Bloggers Conference coming up in June.

You can listen online here or download our podcast on iTunes.

Of all the regions covered so far in BC Wine 101, the West Side Wine Trail is the most urban. The Trail takes you through areas in West Kelowna where vineyards that have grown for over 50 years are now surrounded on all side by gated housing developments. They are probably the only collection of wineries in BC that are accessible by public transit. But Being this close to Kelowna and the growing communities of West Kelowna has its benefits.

The range of wineries here is truly amazing. A 3-minute drive on Mt. Boucherie Road will take you past wineries in garages and quonset huts, mid-sized wineries with modest wine shops, and a huge commercial winery with an architectural grandeur that is unparalleled in BC and probably Canada as well. And according to Tina Slamka in this podcast, all of these wineries have one similar feature that unite them all, regardless of their size.

I first explored the area as a wine tourist 10 years ago. I remember going to two very different wineries that day and having a great experience at both of them. The view of Okanagan Lake is so dominating here, it is impossible to ignore at every winery on the trail because of the slope on which the wineries are perched. I remember taking a lot of photos that day.

In this podcast, Tina Slamka Chair of the West Side Wine Trail, co-owner and wine shop manager of Little Straw Vineyards, and Salina Petschulat Curtis, marketing coordinator for the West Side Wine Trail sit down for a chat about what makes the West Side such a welcoming place.

The wineries of the West Side Wine Trail:

Beaumont Family Estate Winery	Kalala Organic Estate Winery	Little Straw Vineyards
Meadow Vista Honey Wines	Mission Hill Family Estate Winery	Mt. Boucherie Estate Winery
Quails’ Gate Estate Winery	Rollingdale Winery	Volcanic Hills Estate Winery

Tasting in front of Quail’s Gate Estate Winery.

From the Barrel Top Grill at Little Straw Vineyards. Volcanic Hills is across the street, Mt Boucherie and Beaumont Wineries are on the far left. .

The Amphitheater at Mission Hill Family Estate Winery. The Terrace Restaurant is on the left.

 

That’s Pinteresting!

Hey BC wine lovers! I’ve added a Pinterest page (finally, I know – it’s been on my to-do list for a while now) and so please check it out and follow or pin or whatever it is that you say when you on Pinterest. I’ve made a board for sharing photos of wine tours and wine shops. Let’s share our experiences at these great places in BC!

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke