About

Photo by Jennifer Schell

I am a wine industry professional and wine writer who has been working in the wine industry since 2005 and in Okanagan Valley since 2007.

My first book, Valleys of Wine: A Taste of British Columbia’s Wine History (Whitecap Books) was published in 2019 and I am the co-author with John Schreiner of The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide (Touchwood Editions) published in 2020.

I have written for other wine publications and blogs over the years, including this one since 2009, which also included a podcast until 2014. A lot has changed in the wine blogging wrld since that time but the main reason that I still write about it is because of the wonder people that I meet in the industry and the experiences that I have been very lucky to have.

If you are looking for point scores or wine recommendations, you won’t find them here. There are tons of wine blogs that offer that kind of stuff and I’m just not into that. If I mention a wine here at all (or on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram), it is because I think it is worth mentioning so consider that my recommendation. If you don’t see  your favourite wine here, perhaps I haven’t tasted it or maybe it’s just not a wine that I enjoyed. Wine preferences are very personal and everybody has there favourites. There are wines out there that I would not even buy for my enemies but could be somebody’s favourite wine of all-time. Who am I to denigrate that? Ranking wines in that way is meaningless to me.

What this blog is about is information about wine country from someone who lives inside of it. I’m not a writer or blogger who visits the Okanagan on a weekend trip once in a while and then goes home and writes a bunch of posts about it. I see the seasons change. I know what the weather was like at my house in any given year. I see new vineyards get planted and old ones grubbed up. This is information about wine country from someone who lives in wine country, and from someone who knows it both sides of the tasting bar. Want to know what that beautiful vineyard looks like in January? Want to know what it sounds like?

There’s a podcast for that…

The Podcasts

I stopped producing podcasts in 2014 but hope to continue with this medium again in the future. It was absurdly time consuming and in combination with a day job, a family, and a home-based business, there was little time left over for anything. I am  hoping that this will change so that I can dedicate more time to creating more podcasts. Until then, there are the archives that you can listen to.

This site was originally just a front for hosting the podcasts and the writing was just fluff to fill space. I quickly learned that people were reading too, perhaps even more than listening. The podcasts have become timepieces now, like a window into history. They are even more valuable to me because my co-conspirator and the person who inspired me to start this site left this world in 2015, well before his time. Listening to these podcasts brings back those memories and preserves his voice that was silenced far too soon.

The people who have participated regularly in this podcast also work in the industry in various ways. All are below a certain age we don’t really remember when BC wine (and Canadian wine) was not entirely fit for human consumption. Our earliest memories of BC are from the early 2000’s or late ’90’s. The wine industry in BC has undergone a major change in the last 20 years and it is in that milieu in which our palates have developed.

“I drank WHAT???”

Though we work in the industry, we are not paid by anyone to promote any particular wine at any time on this website. The only real unwritten ‘rule’ in producing my podcasts is that we don’t ever taste a wine made by the winery for which we currently work. Frequent listeners will notice that, like all rules, it gets bent a little sometimes. But for the most part, we will let you know our relationship to the winery or business and I try to make sure as much appropriate information is properly disclosed.

I hope you enjoy the podcasts as much as I loved producing them.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

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