I have a new website about the podcast that is available here.

So, what’s happening with Wine Country BC? Well, nothing really. This site will eventually be shuttered so I hope to see you all over at the new Sipsters site.

If you haven’t gotten your mitts on a copy of The Sipsters Pocket Guide to 50 Must-Try BC Wines, volume 1, you can order it through Mosaic Books in Kelowna or contact me directly at sipsterswinepodcast (at) gmail.com (or any of the other ways to reach me) and I can set you up with a signed and personalized copy.

I will be shutting down all of the social media associated with Wine Country BC shortly as well. At this time I have no plans to start or continue with any social media for Sipsters. Social media isn’t what it used to be and I’m just not interested in competing for anyone’s attention anymore. Plus, I really don’t think anyone wants to see me ‘pistol pop pop’ or any kind of IG/Tiktok reel that happens to be huge at the moment. Listen to the podcast or email me at the address above.

For the last time, cheers from wine country!

My priorities have changed since 2009 and for a lot of different reasons. When I first registered the Wine Country BC site and started posting stuff, I had no intention of writing anything. It was a front for the podcasts. This was back when I had to explain to people what a podcast was. I enjoyed every second of making a podcast but they were a lot of work. I estimate that for every 10 minutes of podcast audio, there is about an hour’s worth of time invested into producing it. It was crazy and I met so many amazing people and had some fantastic experiences. But it had to stop. Mostly because it seemed that people weren’t listening. Then when I started writing stuff, people paid attention and visits to the site went up. Social media, at the time, was better at spreading words than it was at spreading sounds.

Social media has changed a lot. It’s a different world in there. Instead of seeing what people are up to and learning about new things, it is people selling things. Some of the things are really cool (I bought a couple of City Bonfires last fall), some are interesting to watch, but most are just annoying and repetitive. I don’t know what I searched for to bring up an ad for tactical ear muffs but apparently I fit that demographic. If people aren’t selling things, then they are trying to get you to believe something. Posting an out-dated (or forged) photo to show that this politician is clearly corrupt or something and putting emojis and hashtags next to it is not constructive conversation. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Originally, I thought that wine and social media went really well together. Wine is a social industry and it seemed to line up that way. Now it seems that social media is more divisive than it is truly social. Being interested in something is less important than being right. Disparaging someone is more important than learning something new. I want no part of that. If we’re all shouting, then it’s just noise isn’t it?

Online wine writing has changed too, but for the better. The quality is so far above my meanderings from years ago. I’m always reading Silk + Coupe Laura’s articles. She’s been publishing some of the most interesting commentary on wine and the wine scene that I’ve read in years. They range from thought-provoking and controversial to hilariously witty and sarcastic with a lot of shades of grey in between. It’s always Grand Cru-level writing. She needs to publish a book stat. Of course, I always head to read the words of the master, John Schreiner’s blog, which is always on my read list with the latest tastings and winery news. I don’t know how he keeps that pace up.

Ultimately, I stopped producing podcasts when I started writing books. I am now writing the second volume of The Sipster’s Pocket Guide. I am a little shocked that anyone bought the first one but thrilled that it made the BC best seller list. I just found out that it is going for a second printing and I’m in the throes of writing Volume 2 right now. (If any wineries want to be included, I am still in need of a few wines – rosé in particular. Contact me asap.)

As for social media, I’ve started deleting accounts and scaling back. It’s just not fun anymore. Perhaps I’ve aged out of it but something tells me that’s not it.

It’s not me. It’s you.

A strange book appeared in my line of sight after moving some items around in my storage room. There were three books, each containing wine labels that had been soaked off their bottles. Most were labels from Italy, France, Spain, and BC but there were some others in there too. Some had early tastings notes scribbled on the pages and others only had the labels. Each one brought back memories from a long time ago.

Being conscious of time changes as we age. As kids, we might have thought that the days at school were too long, the summers were too short, and every new school year felt like it was never going to end in October but suddenly went by too fast in June. In my twenties, it seemed like time was perfect for the pace of life I had then. After my kids were born, things felt like they were speeding up. Years went by more quickly somehow.

Is this a sign of a mid-life crisis? Ha! Perhaps.

Wine lovers seem to have a particular fascination with time, like we always try to remember particular years as vintages. Some years were better than others. Wine regions in the world are more or less sensitive to those good or bad years. Anyone in the wine industry here will have opinions and definite memories about a particular year based on their own personal experiences from that year.

2003 – “Bad fire year. I had ash all over my car during harvest.”

2009 – “That was the year of that frost in early October! Remember that?”

2011 – “F%^k.”

I recently discovered a small collection of labels that I had saved, starting from when I first moved to this province in 2000. It also happens to represent my first few years learning to wine. The more that I tasted and explored, the more that I wanted to learn. It was the beginning of what would become a journey into a sensory adventure that is still going on today.

I read everything and anything I could get my hands on about wine. My ex-inlaws gave me wine books for Christmas and provided some great wine tasting experiences. John Schreiner’s books were easy to find in the library and at book stores and provided a wealth of knowledge about BC wine. Anthony Gismondi’s columns in the Vancouver Sun, subscribed to Wine Access magazine and bought others when I could. I learned how opinionated wine could be, which not only drew me into it further but also introduced me to the language of wine criticism. I knew that I had to be a part of it somehow.

I volunteered at the Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival. I met all kinds of people who were also interested in wine as well as people in the BC wine industry – Roland Kruger and Harry McWatters were two that I distinctly recall from those days. The more people that I met, the more they told me about what they knew and their experiences with wine. It was fantastic.

After moving to the Okanagan, blogging started to become a ‘thing’. I started this blog in 2009 as a front for the podcast that I produced with my friend and co-worker the late Aaron Olfert but soon grew to include a whole bunch of great people, some of whom are now winemakers. I attended wine bloggers conferences and met even more people. This was at the beginning of social media which only accelerated networking to new parts of the country and other countries. I even presented a seminar on podcasting at one of the conferences.

It turns out that blogging was really the gateway into other things like writing (first guesting on others’ blogs and then at Wine Trails magazine. Somehow – I’m still not sure how – this progressed into books and then teaching at Okanagan College. One things really seems to lead to another and the journey seems to be continuing to evolve. It’s little wonder that wine is really the great metaphor for life in that way. A good wine should change and evolve in the bottle as it ages and then potentially again the glass as you experience it. There are a lot of possibilities in every bottle and every sip. This wine journey of mine has taken me to a lot of different places with a lot of different people.

All that from finding a bunch of old labels stuffed into books. Where did your journey start?

These little cans might just be the most interesting new thing to hit the BC wine market in a while. For all of us who have started hiking, canoeing, or generally ‘getting out there’ more often since the start of the pandemic, carrying around a little sip of vinous loveliness without the weight of a bottle is perfect. Red, white, or sparkling, these little vessels can be brought just about anywhere.

Here are my thoughts on each of the ones that I tried recently:

“Lake Okanagan Breeze” Pinot Blanc (oopsie, I mean “Lake Breeze” Pinot Blanc…)

Marketing blunders aside (though it looks like they fixed the confusion over their name), this is a wine I am quite familiar with. I tried looking for differences but the reality is that this tastes like the same stuff in the bottle. The only difference was that there was a noticeable buildup of bubbles on the sides of the glass. Not sure if it was the glass itself or if the wine had more dissolved CO2 it than normal. It wasn’t off-putting – just noticeable. Otherwise, it was refreshing because after finishing it, I was in fact refreshed, which is exactly what happens when I enjoy the bottled version.

Seaside Pearl Daffodils Sparkling Wine

From the familiar to the first-time, I do not recall tasting anything from this winery thus far. (I’m pretty good at recalling that kind of thing generally.) There is no mention of what grapes are use for this wine but it doesn’t really matter since there is not a lot of competition within the sparkling wine in a can category. It’s very pleasant to drink though and refreshing. The bubbles are not really all that persistent so if you’re expecting a good foamy mousse on your picnic, bring a bottle of a traditional method instead. This is a frizzante-style of sparkling wine but I can name a lot of frizzante wines with better bubbles than this. Whether this is the can’s fault or not is hard to tell since I haven’t tried the bottled version to compare it. Regardless, it’s got an unexpectedly long finish and lovely floral flavours that keep things interesting through the whole experience. This is clearly a gamble for Seaside Pearl to can this wine and I sincerely hope it pays off for them. It’s a lovely wine and I totally recommend it for enjoying anywhere you can lug a can.

50th Parallel Glamour Farming Gewurztraminer

This winery has impressed me since they opened although it wasn’t their Gew that did it. Regardless, it has been a consistent performer from what I’ve tasted and the canned version doesn’t disappoint. It’s got enough of those Gew-y aromatics to make it pleasing and with strong enough flavours that it won’t get dismantled by a picnic potato salad or random sandwich. Gewurztraminer to me reminds me summers in BC (summers without a heat dome) because the floral / wildflower aromas. I choose this one to see if the can format had any effect on a wine’s aromatic expression. Based on this wine at least, there is no detrimental effects that I can perceive. A lovely wine in a can or bottle is still a lovely wine.

Domaine de Chaberton Red

The only red example that I could find, this one was a bit predictable. I expected a smooth and fruity red, because that’s what I’ve had from Chaberton in the past, and that’s what I got. No harsh tannins, no jagged edges or tangy cheap taste here. Tasting it from a glass, it wasn’t possible to tell if it had come from a bottle or not because it didn’t matter. It’s not Nota Bene and it won’t win the night at a dinner party but it was solid and tasted way better than any ‘cardbordeaux’ or budget-level wine imported from anywhere else in the world. And being that it was the only red in a can on the shelf, Charberton should be applauded for jumping into cans so early with a unique product.

The bottom line

In all fairness, some might find that comparing wines in a can to their bottled brethren might be comparing apples to oranges but I don’t think so. If a winery is going to start using different packaging for the same wine, it is good to know if there are going to be differences. I am aware that wineries that produce bag-in-box versions of wines that they also bottle will use slightly different blends for various production reasons.

I should note that when tasting these wines, I did not sip them straight out the can. I used a wine glass for trying all of the wines although I know that most people will probably drink them straight from the can on an outing or excursion. Aromas are a big part the wine experience for me and getting them out of a can is not exactly ideal. There is a reason why nobody cares what beer or Coke smells like because it doesn’t matter. The serving vessel itself doesn’t promote that idea either. Wine has a different lineage though and for me, it matters.

However, these products are being sold on the concept of “Convenience” and they are exactly that – easy to pack for a hike, canoe ride, or wherever and with a lot less weight and waste than even a half-bottle can offer. Even one can is enough to share with a friend.

There may be a bit of sticker shock when you first see the price. I know I balked at when I first saw them on the shelf. Why pay between $7-$10 for 250mls when I can take a can of cider or beer and get more to enjoy? When I multiplied the price by 3 (a can is 1/3rd of a regular wine bottle), the price didn’t seem all that extravagant. All of the wines that I saw would have retailed for under $30 for a bottle and the cans added up to less than the full retail price of the bottled version. 50th Parallel’s Pinot Gris sells for $8/can on their website but the bottled version is $22.50, making the equivalent cost of the cans a better deal. Perhaps lower packaging costs allows the winery to do that? Bottles cost more and aren’t going to be getting any less expensive anytime soon.

Bottom Line

Some wine is sold in cans. Get used to it. For casual wine enjoyment, it’s going to be difficult to match. Hopefully it won’t be going anywhere. I know I’ll be buying more.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

The big reason for delaying blogging and podcasting is because I have been working on a new book! The Sipsters Pocket Guide to 50 Must-Try BC Wines will be released this September. It is a new style of wine book and talks about wine in a fresh, candid, and conversational way that goes beyond the standard descriptive tasting notes. To me, Sipsters represents a new way to communicate about wine that is freed of the limited and technical vocabulary of wine education (“medium acid”, “aromas of berries and tar”), the cliches of wine sales (“patio sipper”, “pizza wine”), or the manipulative spin of marketers. We are very lucky that there are some amazing wines in BC being produced right now. Describing them by their aromatic components and flavours seems outdated to me now but more importantly, I believe that it misses the point of the wine experience.

For the three or four of you remaining that have been following since the podcasting days, you will probably see this book as a natural progression of the philosophy on wine appreciation that the gang and I used to do on the podcasts all those years ago.

And now, the cover reveal…

This book will be published by Touchwood Editions from Victoria. I going through the second round of proofs and they have done a fantastic job again. Touchwood published “The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide: 6th Edition” that I co-authored with John Schreiner and was published in April 2020. Since that was right at the beginning of the pandemic, we could not do any events to promote it but hopefully you’ve seen that book on the shelves already.

I hope you like it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Cheers from wine country…

~Luke

I first met George in 2008 when I was working in a vineyard near Keremeos. I commuted past Seven Stones and stopped in one day on my way through. George and Vivianne were welcoming and lovely people to talk to and the wines were excellent. I returned whenever I could. George was a fixture at so many of the events – Festival of the Grape, BBQ King, Okanagan Wine Festival tastings – and always had time to talk to me although pausing now and then to gently toss a cork at someone pouring for another winery across the aisle. It was that kind of fun attitude that George brought with him to all of the events that he attended.

It was in January of 2013, while crossing a sketchy makeshift bridge over a massive trench that had been dug out between his house and the winery, that I realized that George’s ambition with Seven Stones was unique. He was building the wine caves that year and he was showing me around it, which was only about 1/3rd completed at the time. Even in that state, it was pretty clear that this was going to be something special. He was taking things to a new level and it was amazing to see. He was excited about the project and was imensly proud of the work that his step-son Colin had done to make it a reality.

For those articles, we often did tastings at his home in the kitchen or dining room. I was amazed at how beautifully quiet it was. I often recorded the interviews at that time because I didn’t have confidence in my handwriting to be able to get down all of the details properly. In case I missed something, at least I had a recording to consult. The focus was entirely on the wine and the conversation about it. I recorded other interviews with him for podcasts as well. It didn’t matter that it was in his quiet house or at a noisy tasting, George always made you feel like the conversation that you were having with him was the only thing happening at the time.

There were a lot of things about George that I will miss. My deepest condolences go to his family and his Seven Stones family.

I am writing another book and just signed the contract this past week!

There is not a lot about it that I can share yet because it does not yet exist. It is also likely to change through the writing and drafting process. I want to focus on some of the most amazing wines being produced in B.C. right now and I’ve chosen around 50 wines to showcase in this book. Many of these have been what I consider to be ‘star performers’ – wines that are consistently good, year after year, but that don’t necessarily get the attention that they deserve. I have also included other new wines that are adventurous that I think have huge potential for the future.

To celebrate the beginning of the new book, I thought that I would try a wine that I had not yet tried but had often heard about. I’d heard mutterings and musings from customers, friends, and people in the industry about French Door Estate Winery all summer. “Have you been to French Door yet?” “Have you tried their Rosé?” “The tasting at French Door is not to be missed!” “Wow, the view is incredible!” “The wines are soooo good!!”

Working in a wine shop all week means that on my days off, the last place that I want to go is to someone else’s wine shop. I just need time away from the din of that atmosphere.

I now regret that decision somewhat.

To be fair, I have been to the building where French Door is now located. The winery and wine shop is in the same building that used to be Montakarn Estate Winery, next door to Le Vieux Pin. I wrote Montakarn’s first article in Wine Trails magazine some years ago and went back to visit on a couple of occasions. Montakarn moved to Okanagan Falls a couple of years ago after selling the Oliver property which is now French Door.

French Door Estate Winery “Héritage” (apparently pronounced “hare-ee-tahj” – not like “meritage”, which rhymes with “heritage”) is amazing. If the pronunciation confuses you, the wine won’t. It is a laser-guided red blend dominated by Syrah. It has a complex array of beautiful flavours that are smooth as silk but has an elegance like the sight of an opulent chandelier in a grand ballroom. It is a highly illuminating wine.

In short, the perfect wine to celebrate the start of something good. It also raises the bar on the wine that I will need to choose for celebrating when this new book gets released in the fall of 2021.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

In touring wineries, I’ve encountered many wine dogs over the years. I think that it belittles them to call them mascots because they often do a lot more work than any mascot could. Some have real jobs to do like scaring away bears and patrolling vineyards for birds or other pests in addition to welcoming visitors to the winery. The first winery dog that I can recall is Mocha, from Blasted Church Vineyards. Mocha was a chocolate lab and was viciously effective at hunting the tennis balls that were thrown randomly into the vineyard.

Victoria wine writer and author Troy Townsin has been publishing the Winery Dogs of BC wall calendar since 2007. Each calendar has featured over 30 pooches that actually live at BC wineries. To date these calendars have raised more than $10,000 for the BCSPCA.

This year, the 2021 BC Winery Dogs calendar has added another cause that it is raising funds for – The Cure Blau Syndrome Foundation.

Blau Syndrome is a rare inflammatory condition that took the life of Troy’s six-year old daughter Lexi last October. Lexi’s role in the calendars for the past four years had been getting dogs to look at the camera whilst they were getting their picture taken. She would often say “I have the hardest job of all and I don’t get any of the credit”.

In the 2021 calendar not only is she getting that overdue credit, but inside the calendar she is pictured together with several of the winery dogs she had worked with during her short life.

Lexi was the inspiration and original founder of the Cure Blau Syndrome Foundation, a non-profit that her parents started to search for a treatment and a cure. The work is continuing to honour her legacy and to fund research into treatments for inflammatory conditions.

The Winery Dogs of BC calendars retail at $14.95 and are now available for purchase and can be shipped worldwide at www.polyglotpublishing.com.

** Contest **

Nominate your favourite winery dog to be Wine Country BC‘s Winery Dog of the Year by leaving a comment below. Or tell us about the most-special dog in your life!

2 comments will be chosen at random and you will each receive a FREE COPY of the 2021 edition of the Winery Dogs of BC calendar delivered right to you!

The winning dog will be interviewed for a feature story / or video here on Wine Country BC!

Naramata wasn’t the first wine region in B.C., nor is it the largest. But it will be the first B.C. wine region to be the setting for a wine touring-themed board game. If shopping locally isn’t enough, now you’ll be able to play locally too.

The game is the creation of game designer Chris Dias of Dias Ex Machina from Prince George. Chris’s experience with wine collecting and touring inspired this new wine themed game. If the trivia focus of Winerd or Wine Wars isn’t your thing or if you are still healing from you last game of Wineopoly, then Naramata: A Game of Wine and Tourism will be for you.

Chris took some time to answer a few of my questions about this cool new game.

1 – What inspired you to create a board game around wine touring?

I have been wanting to get in Board Game design for years. My background is in tabletop role playing, but I wanted to try my hand at a related field. I am also a wine drinker; I have about 180 bottles at any one time.  When my friends and I would gather to play, a bottle of wine would always be opened, so it just like the perfect melding of ideas.

2 – What is it about Naramata that makes it good for setting this game?

Originally, the game encompassed the entire Okanagan Region, but eventually, I just wanted to focus on one specific area. And Naramata just flowed off the tongue easier that Osoyoos.    Plus of all the regions in BC Wine Country, Naramata is the only one exclusively associated with wine and spirits.

3 – The videos on your Kickstarter website have video segments that you’ve filmed at wineries in Naramata. Are the wineries there generally on board (fun intended) with your plans for this game?

I felt it was mandatory to get their support and presence on the board. People forget that Monopoly is based off a real location. There are a bunch of games based on real places, Ulm, Santorini. There is even a game called Lakes of the Okanagan, which has nothing to do with wine. We needed real wineries on our board, so we reached out to them in August and the response was amazing. In total, I believe we have 26 real wineries on the board.  We introduced two of our own, because its my game and I wanted to pretend I owned a winery on the bench. But the Naramata wineries helped us legitimize our quality.

4 – How long does it take to develop a game and what are the steps involved in that process?

It can take several months to several years. My previous project, another board game, is being published by another company—that’s been in development for three years. Naramata was very fast because everyone so totally focused in its production. The first step is admitting you have a problem….I mean an obsession. You want to create this game. The next step is just playing the base idea on paper and custom components until you have a solid framework.  Then you bring on graphic designers and illustrators and they help bring your project to life.

5 – Could there be future editions of this game that feature different game boards from different wine regions? Expansion boards?

That was always our plan; when we decided to focus on Naramata, we immediately knew we could expand out to Kelowna, Osoyoos, and Niagara. When we approached an American celebrity chef we were friends with, he immediately wanted us to cover Napa, so, I believe that’s in the cards as well. We expect that we’ll run a second campaign next year for these expansions.

6 – Can people drink wine while playing this game? Or do you think it might be likely to go downhill if too many bottles are opened? Is there a discernible “cogent thought process” to “number of opened wine bottles” ratio that players should be aware of?

Although there is not wine-related mechanic in game, we always play with alcohol around the table. I personally can open a bottle from every winery on the board, but that would be…unwise. I would hope people would bring a couple bottles to the table. Thankfully, Naramata: A Game of Wine & Tourism is a medium complexity game so it shouldn’t burn your brain as much.

7 – When do you expect to have this game ready for release?

We already have 95% of all the assets completed, so we plan on accelerating into production almost immediately. We’ll run a post campaign to catch the few people that missed the initial Kickstarter, then we’ll ship to have the game out sometime next winery season.

Check out Naramata: A Game of Wine and Tourism on their Kickstarter page.

What amazes me is not only how loyal B.C. wine lovers are, but how the concept of “local” has expanded. In my day job selling wine, I’ve spoken with many people from Vancouver (4 hours’ drive west) and Calgary (8 hours’ drive east) as well as Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg. What amazes me is that people from all of those places consider B.C. wine as “local”. Ontario wineries should be so lucky.

Only in Canada is driving for 3 days still considered “shopping locally”. I love that.

That got me thinking about what local really means for me, particularly as we approach what is probably going to be the weirdest Christmas season in generations. I have no close family in my own time zone so ordering gifts online has been a convenient way to send or receive gifts. The difference this year where I am going to choose to spend my money. In the past, I’ve done at least 3 Christmases successfully without visiting any big-box retailers or even a shopping mall. And after 20 years of Amazon, I think they’ve had enough of my money. Where I can go to buy gifts?

With the increase in online shopping from platforms like Shopify or Wix, there now appears to be a critical mass of other options available. Some of them might even be from your own friends list on Facebook (if you haven’t yet deleted your account after watching The Social Dilemma, of course) but others might be only a short online search away! Spending your money amounts to a vote these days, so spend wisely.

Wine

Of course, gifts of wine are the easiest to order online and many wineries offer free shipping for the holidays.

If wine ordered online is your gift, some wineries are even getting creative with tasting experiences. Lightning Rock in Summerland is offering a “winemaker video call” with Jordan and Tyler! This is a great way to learn about the wines and is a spectacular addition to any wine gift.

If you really want to support a winery with the gift that keeps on giving, consider a wine club membership. Wine clubs are the most profitable sales channel per bottle for a winery so there’s a reason why wine club members are treated like rock stars by wineries. If you drink more than 1 bottle of wine a week (which is almost a prerequisite for reading this blog), wine clubs are a great way to save money. Some of them even have incentives for gifting and signing up friends. Check out this article on wine clubs for more information.

Books

Amazon’s lock on the books departmet has become grotesque. But there are smaller stores that have stepped up their own online presence to help their own business. Mosaic Books in Kelowna has a great site with all of their available titles and they can order anything in that might not be in stock. Currently, they ship only to B.C. and Alberta. I’m not the only one with this idea – a Google map created recently provides locations for other bookstores that also ship so please consider those stores first. Small independent bookstores have been suffering for decades so start your shopping there.

Another great way to support writers is to order a book directly from them or contacting the publisher and ordering directly from them! For instance, both of the books that I’ve written (see sidebar on the right) are linked directly to the publisher’s websites.

Jewellery

Great gifts come in small packages too. Aurora Artistic creates jewellery with original photographs of the northern lights. Amy Caldwell, based in Thompson, Manitoba, captures the images and makes them into amazing earrings and pendants that has the beauty of the northern lights on them.

Closer to the wine world, Laura at Silk + Coupe has jewellery and other wine-themed merch, including the new-famous Titty Tee t-shirts, parasols, and digital prints available for sale on her website.

Things to do

The one thing that I’ve noticed people doing during this pandemic is learning new skills. First, there was the baking thing (raise your hand if you tried to make your own sourdough) and then guitars started flying off the shelves in music stores. Even if it’s just cooking a little more at home, it’s great to see so many people being creative and learning some great new crafts.

My friend Robin Whitford in Ottawa has created an empire of all things to do with this form of textile-loving called Hooking Outside the Lines. She’ll get you set up with kits to get started and then show you how to do it all with regular online workshops.

Another friend, musician and artist Moksha Sommer, offers seminars called “Conscious Creative Practice” which is a deep-dive into using art “as tools of healing, discovery, and expression”. These will be online sessions starting in January. She also has a range of art and music for sale and you should check out her band HuDost while your there.

Yet another friend (I only have ten, so this speaks to how amazing they all are…), Ginger LeBoutilliere created Otauna, a system of creating amazing mandalas. If you enjoy colouring, doodling, or painting, you will be all over this.

YouTube Artists

There are many small “cottage” businesses that are run from people on YouTube and focused on various interests. I’ve been watching a lot of sailing videos over the past few years but there are also large communities centre around other subjects like motorcycles, photography, or whatever else might interest you.

SV Delos has been travelling the world for over a decade and to me, they represent the best in curiosity and positive attitude. They sell clothing, beach towels, mugs, and all kinds of stuff. Though it’s hard to say that anyone making their living travelling can be considered ‘local’, there are Canadians doing this that you can support. Captain Rick Moore (from Barrie, Ontario) was an early vlogger on the scene with his boat Sophisticated Lady and also has things for sail.

What I love about purchasing items like this is that you are directly supporting the creator. You do have to be a bit careful with some of these because some of them offer mass-market “Made in China” swag with a branding on it. To me, that defeats the purpose of supporting a small business outside of the globalized economy. But if you are wanting to show support for someone who you think is worthy of it, purchasing their products is still a great way to do it.

Other stuff

There are some things that I’d never even considered looking for a more local source – like lingerie. It is a bit of a secret (see what I did there?) that you don’t need to bother with the big brands because there are small producers in textiles too. Sokoloff Lingerie is based out of Montreal and has all the good stuff, as well as face masks! Fortnight Lingerie is based in Toronto. It’s not hard to search local manufacturers for the things that you might usually shop for at a large store. Gifts for your dog? Check out Jasper’s Dog Treats in Vancouver. And don’t forget to clean up after the holidays with environmentally-awesome cleaning supplies from Norwex.

Wrapping it up

Some of these suggestions have come to you directly from my friends list on Facebook. I only say that to drive home the point that a lot of things that we need in life don’t have to come from a store far away. Very likely there will be a friend out there who has what you need. I’ve grown up in an age where everything comes from somewhere else, where products are so disconnected from their source that their value can be depressed so far that they become cheap commodities. No ‘law’ will ever make me want to pay the lowest price if what I get has actual value to me.

If anything, what I’ve learned from my time in the B.C. wine industry is that things do come from a place. With so many friends in all of those places, I want to support them all as much as I can. Pandemic or not, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Cheers from wine country.

~Luke

If the town of Oliver is going to call itself “The Wine Capital of Canada”, there should be at least a little credit given to the first person to plant in a vineyard there. Though this person did not necessarily make wine commercially from those grapes, he was an early champion of the potential for grapes in the Oliver area.

His name was Joseph Renyi, a Hungarian immigrant who settled on a plot of land around 1930 just outside of the then-new town of Oliver on the corner of Fairview Road and today’s Sumac Street. Renyi had been advised by fellow Hungarians Dr. Eugene Rittich and his brother Virgil to plant grapes. In addition to his duties as the winemaker at Growers Wines, Dr. Rittich was then in the midst of research for his book on growing grapes in the Pacific Northwest, which was called European Grape Growing: In cooler districts where winter protection is necessary and later published in 1941. The Rittich brothers encouraged many new settlers and orchardists to plant grapes as part of their crops.

Joseph Renyi was so enthusiastic about grapes that he would eventually plant a total of 5 acres of grapes. Varieties that he planted included Pearl of Csaba, White Chasselas, Thousand Good, Riesling, and Excellent – a Hungarian variety which, according to one theory later became known as Okanagan Riesling (more on this later). Renyi was optimistic about the prospects for growing grapes in Oliver. He was quoted often in the local newspapers about how he believed that the “sandy soils” were perfect for growing grapes. He claimed that a small acreage could produce a lot more fruit with grapes than it could ever do with tree fruits. As far as he was concerned, grapes were the best crop for the Oliver area. 

Like some other early pioneers of the industry in B.C., he was a little too far ahead of his time. The packing house in Oliver was equipped for tree fruits, not delicate bunches of grapes. Getting grapes to a wider market in other regions was beyond both Renyi’s and the young farming community’s means at the time. Though the Kettle Valley Railway was operational as far as Oliver by then, it is not clear why his grapes did not find a consistent market. At the same time in Kelowna, horticulurist J.W. Hughes was closer to a large market and had his own packing operations, which allowed his fruit to be sold as far away as the prairies. Renyi did not have access to that same transportation or economies of scale so selling his grapes was not easy. When he died in 1944, his vineyard was ripped out and fruit trees were planted.

As mentioned earlier, Renyi’s vineyard contained a grape variety called that would come to be known as Okanagan Riesling. John Vielvoye, the province’s grape specialist during this critically important time in the B.C. wine industry’s history, Renyi’s vineyard is the source for the white grape variety. Okanagan Riesling was once ubiquitous with B.C.’s wine industry and is not the same Riesling that we are familiar with today. Prior to the Free Trade Agreement in 1988, Okanagan Riesling (and the red Marechal Foch) made up the two most commonly planted grape varieties in the Okanagan. The first Icewine ever produced commercially by Hainle Vineyards in Peachland was made using Okanagan Riesling. It was winter hardy and could be cropped heavily so it was used as the base for many of the commercial wineries’ low-cost, blended wines. Interestingly, this variety was not one of the ones that was recommended by Dr. Rittich based on his research and published in his book. 

After Free Trade, both of these varieties were reviled by the new wine industry, particularly from the growing number of estate wineries. Symbolically at least, it represented the “bad old days” of B.C. wine, so their systematic removal from vineyards was celebrated as a step forward. Marechal Foch managed to survive in small quantities largely thanks to Quails’ Gate’s winemaker in the 1990s, Jeff Martin, who crafted a highly concentrated red wine that gained a near cult-like following. Wineries in the cooler regions (the coastal regions, Shuswap, and the Kootenays) have also adopted Foch for their portfolios. Okanagan Riesling was never championed by any estate winery to a similar degree of success and hasn’t been spotted publicly for years.  Though they are planning to replace it, House of Rose in Kelowna is the last winery to use Okanagan Riesling for a commercial wine, although it is possible that this variety survives in backyards elsewhere in the valley.     

Happily, the property that once belonged to Joseph Renyi is now vineyard once again as Stonehouse Vineyard, which also operates as a vineyard and vacation rental property. It supplies Riesling grapes (the kind we know today) to Scout Vineyards in the Similkameen Valley.

What does that do to the other regions that are now growing grapes and making wine? Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands have been making wine for just as long (longer, actually – “Valleys of Wine” spoiler alert). If we lined up wines from the Okanagan with those from other wine regions, the comparisons are not always fair. How can we begin to compare apples to apples? What is a good way to measure the progress of all of our wine regions?

I’m on the record as stating (7 years ago on an American podcast) that the wines that B.C. does more distinctly are Syrah and Gewurztraminer. I continue to stand by that assessment. The depth and complexity coming from modern vintages of Syrah are astounding. I have yet to find other regions in the world that can make the kinds of scents and flavours that come from Gewurztraminer and other aromatic wine grape varieties.

But Syrah cannot be grown outside of the south Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys so we can’t really compare wines made between multiple regions fairly. What grapes grow in the most regions and can they show us what makes those regions unique?

Aromatic varieties are probably the style that will allow us to compare multiple regions. Riesling is a good option but consider Siegerrebe, which may be the variety that is grown in the most regions in the province;

• Gray Monk has been growing it for years in the Okanagan
• Sea Star has a beautiful one grown on Pender Island.
• Recline Ridge has had it on their property since the 1990s in the Shuswap.
• Valley of the Springs in the Kootenays uses it as their mainstay for the signature blend Vista and has produced a single-varietal version as well.
• Blue Grouse and Venturi Schultz in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island have grown Siegerrebe for many years.
• Mt. Lehman Winery has a Siegerrebe and Domaine de Chaberton and Singletree each have at least two different wines made from it in the Fraser Valley.

Pinot Noir is another possible grape variety with a lot of representation across many wine regions. I would argue that the aggregate quality of Pinot Noirs across the regions is lower than that of aromatic varieties, such as Siegerrebe. A case could be made for Marechal Foch as well since that variety (formerly B.C.’s most widely planted red grape variety prior to Free Trade in 1989) is still represented in many regions as a respectably produced red wine.

Whichever grape variety makes its way into some semblance of a universally accepted grape variety for B.C., it is important that we compare apples to apples when considering the different wine regions going forward. #BCwine is a lot more than just the Okanagan Valley. If you like the adventure of tasting wines from different places, B.C. has a lot of wines to explore.

Happy sipping!

~Luke

What did these two contribute to the BC wine industry? How about creating estate wineries? Maybe you’ve visited one or bought wine from one recently? Without estate wineries, the wine industry here would be unrecognizable today. Estate winery history in B.C. leads back straight to Rafe and Tex in 1977.

Rafe Mair, who had become an environmental and political activist, had a solid online presence and was easy to find. I sent him an email, which he  answered almost immediately. I wrote it late on December 30, 2015 and he received it the next day which also happened to be Rafe’s 84th birthday. Even before meeting him, I could sense that he was happy that I had contacted him about this topic. As I later learned, he was not in good health having suffered a bad fall in his home some months earlier. His life was confined largely to the ground floor of his townhouse in Lion’s Bay and anywhere his mobility scooter could take him. With a huge collection of books built onto one wall and patio doors with a stunning view of Howe Sound to the west, Rafe’s world may have been limited by his mobility but his mind certainly was not. He had opinions and a sharpness of wit that was never dulled during any of our conversations or emails.

The first meeting in January 2016 also included Tex Enemark, Rafe’s deputy during his time in cabinet and a person that he credits with doing a lot of the heavy lifting at the Ministry. In an email to me shortly before the meeting, Rafe said, “It’s difficult, even in retrospect, to believe [Tex] accomplished what he did, with forces he had to deal with, in the time he took.” In further email exchanges, Rafe was clearly thankful of his special relationship with his deputy. Another quote from an email sent to both Tex and I illustrates this deep connection when he said, “Tex …we did so much together and to me this was our # 1 legacy if only because it was gloriously unusual and at no step did we let orthodoxy get involved. A partnership and lifetime friendship was scarcely the least of our accomplishments. Very few politicians/bureaucrats can say they were out to make major reforms and did so.”

Here is how they did it…

Excerpt from “Valleys of Wine” (Whitecap Books, 2019)

If you are interested in exploring more about the history of wine in B.C., you might be interested in a new online course from Okanagan College;

From my research, British Columbia’s first winery was called Growers Wine Company Ltd. in Victoria. No, it was not in the Okanagan. And no, they did not use grapes to make their first wines. Yes, the name still survives to this day, but on cans of cider produced by its corporate descendants (Arterra). It has a very interesting story that will not leave you strained…

Excerpt from “Valleys of Wine” (Whitecap Books, 2019)

BC’s first winery was created shockingly soon after Prohibition ended in the province. It started up in response to Vancouver Island’s record crop of loganberries and blueberries with only small markets for either. There was apparently only so much loganberry jam a family could use in those days.

Whatever brought them acclaim initially, loganberries caught on to a point where the market could no longer sustain the amount being produced. As well, fresh berries are delicate and spoil easily, and it took considerable time to transport anything off the island. Someone had to find another use for these berries since much of the agriculture on southern Vancouver Island depended on berry production.

Loganberries were created by horticulturalist James Harvey Logan in Santa Cruz, California. They are a cross between particular varieties of raspberries and blackberries. They look like blackberries but the juice is a dark red colour, similar to wine, rather than black (like juice from blackberries) or bright red (like juice from raspberries). The plants were larger and more productive than either of the parents and could produce large quantities of fruit. They were also easy to propagate using clones from cuttings just like grape vines and could produce similar tonnages per acre as grapes. It was berry grower Neil Lamont who first tried to make wine from loganberries prior to 1922. In his basement, he successfully fermented a batch of logan- berry juice. Lamont was a teetotaler with no interest in wine, as were many of the other berry growers, but he recognized the importance of his winemaking experiment as a way to create a new market for the region’s berry crop. If he succeeded, berry growers in Saanich and the Fraser Valley could have a large and consistent market for their crop—the dream of all farmers—and could change the fortunes of many berry producers. Together with growers Harry Tanner and Charles B. McCarthy (also non-drinkers), they took bottles of logan- berry wine to Vancouver “businessmen” (likely at the newly created Liquor Control Board) to see if they liked the wine and if it could be sold.

On an overnight ferry from Victoria to Vancouver a near tragedy unfolded as the bottles of wine pushed out their corks (they were re-fermenting) and spilled their contents into the suitcase in which they were being held. When Lamont found that the suitcase had contained the liquid, they simply strained it back into the bottle and continued on their way to Vancouver!

The businessmen liked the wine, saying there was “nothing else like it” according to one version of the story told by Tom Mitchell, who was president of the Saanich Fruit Growers Association in the 1960s. Lamont now had a green light: the wines were palatable, unique, and worth producing—if they could create enough to make it worthwhile for everyone involved.

Lamont and the growers secured a government grant for ten thousand dollars to start Growers’ Wine Company Ltd. in 1922 through the Saanich Loganberry Growers Association. Henry Mitchell, “a private Victorian,” also put up five thousand dollars to purchase sugar for fermentation and to help start the company. Mitchell received the first certificate of shares and number two went to Lamont. In lieu of cash, many of the early berry growers who supplied loganberries to the winery received certificates of shares in the company.

The first winery was located on Wharf Street in downtown Victoria in the old HBC warehouse across from Bastion Square.* A local company manufactured a press for them and “tanks and vats” were purchased from “the Italian Swiss Wine Co.” from California, which had recently been closed by American Prohibition. By 1927, Growers’ required more space and purchased property at 3948 Quadra Street. It was expanded in 1928 and ’29 and eventually included the nearby Lakehill Pumping Station at 3940 Quadra. Wine production would remain at this location for more than fifty years.

If you are interested in exploring more about the history of wine in B.C., you might be interested in a new online course from Okanagan College;

If you are looking for a real wine adventure, this is it. Visiting a wine region that currently only has one winery means that it is adventure you’ll be seeking and not a full day of wine touring. Nakusp, BC is located near the mid-point of the Upper Arrow Lakes and just like the Okanagan, nobody passes through this area on the way to somewhere else. People who go there want to go there. Since we are being advised to travel within our own province this summer, I suggest that this region is great for exploring. Valley of the Springs is also a winery that you really should not miss.

I visited them last summer and camped nearby at MacDonald Creek Provincial Park with my kids, unaware of how difficult it is normally to get a camping spot at this popular park. We traveled to the visit the winery, which had not yet been completed, and met owners Jody and Brenda Scott outside. They were in the final phase of renovating the building where their wine shop and winey were going to be located. The weather was perfect for an outdoor tasting and they had set up a beautiful table for the occasion.

I have tasted a lot of wines from the very first vintages of new wineries and I’ve found that wines from new wineries can lack character, especially if they are made in brand new buildings. Perhaps these new wineries decided to play it safe with their grape growing or winemaking decisions to minimize risk in some way. Whatever their decisions, a lot of new wineries fail to impress with wines from their first vintages for whatever reasons. The good wineries will learn from it and subsequent vintages will get more interesting and their reputation will be built on those wines instead.

It was clear to me early on that this is not the case with Valley of the Springs. All of their wines had character immediately and were ready to take on the palates of B.C. wine lovers. The stand out for me was Vista, a wine based on Siegerrebe that was the only wine in the portfolio at the time that used fruit grown only in the Arrow Lakes region. The other wines had fruit from the Okanagan, mostly in the north. This has since changed with the current vintages offered on their website. Jody’s goal is to eventually use only fruit grown locally.

The other stand out was the Marechal Foch. I should start by saying that I have never had an aversion this grape variety that other people have. The Quails’ Gate Old Vines Foch was a beautiful wine to me when I was learning about B.C. wine so I’ve never understood people’s retiscence to accept Foch as a legitimate wine. I’ve never felt that Foch was a grape that was “deported from France” the way one winery owner once described it to me.

Suffice it to say that this might be a Foch that even the Foch-denyers might even be able to enjoy. The aromas were bright and fruity, bursting with red cherry and plums. The palate was equally enthusiastic and plesantly fruity. I purchased this wine again later and its complexity only increased since my first tasting.

My top picks for Valley of the Springs are:

• Vista – The complexity on this is what sends it to the top for me. It’s got pears, white peaches, flowers, and a unique herbal edge that I can only attribute to being from the Arrow Lakes.
• Marichal Foch – See above.
• Bacchus – This one showed more jumpy white grape fruity character at the first tasting in 2019 but has calmed down since then. Wonderful flavours overall and big enough to handle fuller flavours like Mongolian beef.

Note – This winery’s portfolio is loaded with aromatic white wines and only one medium red. If that is a style that you do not enjoy, this might not be the winery for you. If you do enjoy exploring different wines and have enjoyed wine touring in the Shuswap or Vancouver Island, this is a winery that you should not miss.

Their wine shop’s grand opening was held this past weekend and their guest suite will be available mid-August. 

Excerpt from the recently published Okanagan Wine Tour Guide (published by Touchwood Editions):

River Stone Estate Winery should be on your radar by now. If you haven’t been able to try their wines, any of them, then you are missing out on the authentic boutique B.C. wine experience. 

I featured them on a podcast way back in 2011 but had met owners Ted and Lorraine Kane some time before that at a dinner function. He told me about his vineyard and winery that he had been working on and I told him about this site and the podcasts that I was then planning to do. I gave him my contact information and told him to contact me when he was going to release his wine. 

It was a bit of a surprise when I received a phone call a year and a half later from Ted asking if I’d like to record a podcast with his wines. We set a time and I brought my recorder over to his house to chat and taste through 4 wines that he had ready at that point – Pinot Gris, Malbec Rosé, Cabernet Franc, and Corner Stone. I have interviewed Ted often for other articles, attended parties at the winery, brought tour groups to visit the winery, performed music at events, and had some great chats with him in the years since. Ted and Lorraine came to my birthday vertical party in 2018 that featured the 5 vintages of Corner Stone that I had saved in my cellar. Ted’s birthday present was two subsequent vintages of Corner Stone – one that had just been released and the other that had just been bottled – which made a complete set of wines to taste! It was a great way to celebrate.

Now in their 10th year of production, River Stone is clearly on a high-quality path of consistency. In the decade that I’ve been experiencing River Stone wines, Ted has brought consistency to his wines without trying to gloss over the variations that come naturally from different vintages. Like great works of art, they appeal to a lot of people on many different levels. That is not easy to do. 

My top picks for River Stone are:

• Corner Stone – An iconic Meritage wine of the Okanagan.
• Pinot Gris – Classy, elegant, and smooth version of this variety.
• Malbec Rosé – My “Canada Day Rosé”, mostly because of its beautiful colour. Excellent flavours.
• Cabernet Franc – Can’t get enough of this one, mostly because they don’t make very much of it. 
• Milestone – a small production Cheval Blanc-style blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. I’ve never tasted it but if anyone has a bottle of this, I have an invitation to my next birthday vertical party for you…

Excerpt from the recently published Okanagan Wine Tour Guide (published by Touchwood Editions):

What makes River Stone unique is the vineyard. Visitors drive up a steep and narrow vine-hugged road to the wine shop on the hilltop. The hill that driveway climbs, and on which the vines are planted, is a mound of gravel deposited in a former geological time by the postglacial flow of the Okanagan River. This is what River Stone has in common with some of the grand cru châteaux of Bordeaux, which are also located on top of river-strewn gravel deposits.

The winery is owned by Ted and Lorraine Kane. Ted, who’s from Edmonton and was born in 1962, was so focused on wine growing that he grew grapes in a greenhouse there just to learn how. He and Lorraine, now a family physician, moved to Oliver in 2002 to plant a 2.8-hectare (7-acre) vineyard on land that, for all of its excellent viticultural qualities, had been fallow for 30 years.

Emulating Bordeaux wineries, Ted planted grape varieties needed for blending. The aspect of the vineyard—rows descend down the hill in three directions—enabled Ted to plant each variety on the most advantageous slope. The wine that Ted envisioned is called Corner Stone and debuted with the 2009 vintage. It was dominated by Merlot for the first four vintages, peaking at 59% of the blend in 2010. Since 2014, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc have taken over the lead roles in Corner Stone.

That change reflects the ongoing refinement of the wines. “For me, the most fun is to think about a new experiment that I’m going to try,” Ted says. That sense of discovery led to two additional wines: Stones Throw, a Merlot-dominated blend, and Milestone, an exclusive small-lot blend of equal parts Cabernet Franc and Merlot inspired by Bordeaux’s Château Cheval Blanc. Milestone is produced only in exceptional years and in very limited volume.

The hilltop is crowned with the Kane family’s home and the garage that functioned as a winery until 2015. Production was moved in that vintage to a new building at the bottom of the property’s eastern slope. The expansion freed up Ted’s garage for the first time. But, he notes, “it just fills up with stuff, like everyone’s garage.” The wine shop, however, still occupies the basement of the house. It leads to an expansive picnic area and a beautiful garden that is surrounded by vines.

Join me online next Tuesday, July 7th on Zoom! It is by donation to the Kelowna Museum, which was absolutely instrumental in my research for writing “Valleys of Wine”. I hope to see you then!

Oh Ontario. More news to file until the “Not really that surprising” category.

Ontario’s Ford government has extended the restriction on receiving interprovincial shipments of wine through their regulations. Wine lawyer Mark Hicken posted today that the Ontario government has amended the law to restrict wine shipments from outside of the province for another year until June 30, 2021. While this was expected to be good news for the wine industry here in B.C., people in the industry that I’ve spoken with were cautiously optimistic about the possibility of Ontario being open for receiving wine shipments directly.

So much for optimism. Aren’t right-wing free-market governments supposed to want less government interference when it comes to their markets? Or is it only when it suits them? Ontario wineries are able to freely publicize their shipping rates to other provinces on their website. Malivoire Wine Company, Cave Spring Cellars, and Fielding Estate Winery all have references to shipping outside of Ontario stated publicly on their websites. Although they are all very different, Malivoire and Cave Spring both specifically list B.C. as a province that can receive shipments of wine. It seems that Ontario is quite willing to sell wines anywhere in Canada but not allow their residents to receive wines from outside. That’s a bit one sided, don’t you think?

Governments don’t just change regulations for nothing. Somebody obviously wanted this done and probably had to work to have the deadline extended. Who would want to do that? Who would be able to do that? Who would be able to excert that kind of force so quietly that this tiny ammendment appears 2 days before the deadline?

Hopefully questions like this will come to light at some point as time goes on. As people are getting used to making regular purchases online, they will be less likely to accept petty restrictions on their purchasing. Governments that are currently in power now should best to take note of that if they want to stay in power. Until the government changes or they wise up to the reality of the new world, Ontario’s wine lovers will continue to be in quarantine for another year.

On my first wine tour in the Okanagan, the very first winery offered us a tasting of their gold medal-winning Gewurztraminer. We loved it and bought a bottle. Then, at the next winery, we were offered a tasting of their gold medal-winning Gewurztraminer. It was good too and we bought that as well. Driving away, we were a bit confused about the gold medal. How could they have won it when the first winery’s Gewurztraminer had also won it? We figured that it must have been from a different competition.

When the third winery offered us a tasting of their gold medal-winning Gewurztraminer, we said, “Ok, hold on. We just tasted two others. How many gold medals are there? In the Olympics, there’s only one for each event. Why are we seeing the same kind of wine winning the same medal? What the hell?”

It’s a good thing that we were at a winery wine shop in April because there was no other customers there and the wine shop person had all the time in the world to explain stuff like this to neophtye wine tasters like us. While I won’t often name names about things like this, in this case I can’t actually remember her name. I do remember that she was a blonde Irish lady that was working at Hawthorn Mountain Vineyards – now See Ya Later Ranch – and she was wonderfully patient. She took the time to explain it all and it was quickly apparent that a) she was educated and knew she was talking about, b) she knew what we were asking, and c) she knew how to take the time to help us understand something that we clearly did not understand.

Since that time in my years in wine sales, I have had to do this similar explanation a number of times. I have also had the chance to see how wine awards function from the perspective of a judge, from the perspective of the people who organize them, and from the perpective of the wineries that rely on them for marketing.

From the organizer’s point of view:

Whoever is organizing the competition has a reason for going to the trouble of hosting the awards. Many are done by magazines or publications of some kind. The All-Canadian Wine Championships was done by Vines Magazine and the National Wine Awards of Canada was first done by Wine Access magazine but taken over by a website called Wine Align when the magazine folded.

Non-profit organizations like the Okanagan Wine Festial Society runs the Best of Varietal wine awards in the spring and the BC Lt. Governors Wine Awards in the fall. This organization has a history going back to the early 1980s and were set up by people in the wine industry. (Full disclosure – I was on the board of directors for this society on two occasions in the past 5 years.)

Organizers of all kinds have a vested interest in keeping their awards legitimate. So they try to attract the best judges that they can get. Rather than have a small number of awards (as in the Olympics), most wine competitions opt to have lots of different awards, which gets the name of the organization out and brings them marketing value. If it is run by a magazine, then they get to publish the results in special issues. The goal for them is to run a good competition and make as many people (customers and advertisers) as happy as possible. Magazines need to fill pages and if there was only 1 gold, silver, and bronze for every wine category, it would not fill a lot of pages. More is better.

From the wine judge’s point of view:

Wine judges love to taste wine and they love to communicate their experiences with it. They do this kind of thing for living and love the opportunity to challenge themselves with tastings. In that way, they have no real vested interest in any particular style of wine. They are there to look for the best wines.

Competitions are generally blind tastings, so the judges know very little about the wines that they are tasting. Generally, they know the grape variety or style (Meritage, Icewine, etc) and may sometimes know the price range (under $25, etc) but otherwise, they know very little else other than what their noses tell them. Their noses can tell them a lot and they will base their judgements mostly around what they smell. If they know that they are given a Pinot Noir and a wine doesn’t smell like a Pinot Noir, it will probably not make it into the medal round. To novice wine tasters, this might sound a bit weird. How can a wine taste like Pinot Noir?? Judges can tell what varietal it is because they know what it should taste like. If you bit into a Snickers bar and it tasted like a Crunchy, you would probably think that it was not a good Snickers bar because that’s not the flavour combination that you were expecting. Wine judges can do that with different grape varieties. A Pinot Noir that tastes like Cabernet Sauvignon is not a good Pinot Noir.

Some judges come with years of experience which can be both valuable and debilitating at the same time. It is valuable in that they have a lot of experience to be able to recognize what a good wine should be. It can be debilitating if they value the wines from a particular region (Burgundy, for example) and then try to base their judgements on all Pinot Noir as it compares to Burgundy (which it will never be because it may not have been produced in Burgundy). This makes juding competitions using wines from new regions like B.C. very dificult to manage and understand.

Wine judges (and wine criticism as well) has evolved to where many wine judges are now more familiar with the potential of B.C. wine and can get a better sense of the spectrum of quality.

From the winery’s point of view:

Many people in the industry roll their eyes at wine awards but they also know that they work to sell wine. I have had customers come in and ask for the gold medal winning wines. I showed one customer six different wines and he asked for a half case of each of them, which I gladly rolled out on a dolly to his vehicle 5 minutes later. Medals sell wine.

Wineries also need to sell wine and those medals will be draped over the bottles in the wine shop but also in graphics overlayed onto their marketing print material. The awards become easy talking points for wine shop staff who start off talking about a wine by saying something like, “This is our gold medal-winning Gewurztraminer…” Sales reps can also use it to drive sales to restaurants and wine retailers, where they can display shalf-talkers that show the award to customers to drive sales. Wine retailers who are caught without a gold medal winning wine in stock will probably not be able to restock it after it wins. Suddenly everyone wants this gold medal-winning wine (sometimes after it has been ignored on the shelf for months prior – I’ve seen that many times too).

Some wineries choose not to enter their wines into any competitions. Some competitions are expensive to enter and require the winery to submit multiple bottles of wine (sometimes 6 bottles). For a winery that sells $80 bottles of Merlot, that’s a lot of lost revenue to gamble on the possibility of winning an award. Some wineries enter their whole portfolio of wines, which is risky because there is a chance that the value-priced $20 Merlot might win a gold while the $50 Merlot comes in with a Bronze. I have seen this kind of thing happen more than once and is a tough one for a winery to explain to their customers.

From the consumer’s point of view:

Wine awards give consumers what they are seeking, which is reassurance. They want to know that a wine is good. To them, a wine with an award means that someone with more knowledge about wine thought that it was a good enough wine to earn a prize. It is really that simple. Just like point scores, these are a great short-hand for finding wines that they are going to feel good and more secure about purchasing. Unconsciously, It may positively alter how they perceive the quality of the wine as well. Is that a bad thing? Maybe. Maybe not.

Customers can usually spot the medal winners if they have shelf talkers or some kind of display to indicate their award. They may already be armed with a list of medal winners or come looking for a particular wine that they know has won an award already. Wine awards add a competitive element to finding wines. It is almost the thrill of the hunt, which can sometimes be more rewarding than the wine itself.

The Importance of Competition

The trick with wine awards is not to get caught up in their importance. Yes, it’s interesting to see which wine wins and everyone loves to watch a good competition. Yes, the wineries that do win will get a big marketing push out of it. Yes, the organization that runs it will get to revel in the glow of it for a while. And yes, consumers may get to try wines that they may not have otherwise considered purchasing.

But is the big winner really the absolute best wine out there? This is what most consumers, like I was and still am, expecting when we see medals hanging off bottles in the wine shop. When not every winery enters, it can not really be considered a complete competition. Wines are also moving targets, as anyone who has worked in a wine shop can tell you. The same wine will taste slightly different from day to day or month to month, as they should since wines evolve over time. If the judging for a competition takes place at a time when a  wine is showing at its best, it will probably do very well.

In wine competitions, timing is everything and nobody has any control over it.

In the 5 years that I produced them, I met a ton of great people in the industry as well as a few listeners. I was always struck by the fact that there were more people willing to be on it than there were people who made time to listen to it.

So I stopped. It was taking up too much time. I was working and had started my WSET Diploma and writing Valleys of Wine. Podcasting just didn’t fit and the work that I put into it did not seem worth it. This was driven home to me when one winery owner that I interviewed ended a conversation with, “Thanks for the free publicity!” I’m sure they meant well but it felt like I was doing a lot of work for nothing.

But the weird thing is that I still love listening to podcasts, and more people are now listening to them too.

Is there anyone out there that would love to see a new version of the Wine Country BC podcast??

Do you want to hear about what is happening in BC’s wine country? Hear interviews with some of the amazing people that make the wines that you love?

Please leave a wine point score or a comment below to vote!

90+ points

This means that you’d love to hear new Wine Country BC podcasts!

80 – 89 points

This means that you might listen but overall, you don’t care. 

<70 points

That means that you don’t care if there are new Wine Country BC podcasts.

Leave a comment with your score below or on Facebook. One person from all votes will be picked at random to be a guest on a podcast (if I start production again!).

None of that is happening right now. At least not with the same volume as previous years.

Even with the relatively good weather that we had in the Okanagan for the whole spring, which would normally bring people out to the wine shops, none of this has happened. The Covid-19 pandemic has shut down some shops and caused a huge re-think of the way that the industry conducts business.

Some wineries have been ready to adapt. Some have chosen to shut down their tasting room completely.  Many have choosen to open later than they normally would. What makes this a difficult time for wine lovers is not that they can’t access the wines that they love, it is the unpredictability of what they can expect out of winery experiences. That makes planning to visit wineries difficult and impulsive visits less possible.

Larger wineries with big tasting rooms and lots of space will be able to accomodate people just fine. Hester Creek on the Golden Mile Bench has made it easy to enter and exit their wine shop easily with a hand sanitizer station and a greeter ready to assist you.  They cannot host the same number of people at the tasting bar like they used to, but you can safely taste wines and then make purchases with more than enough social distance between groups.

Smaller wineries have it a little tougher. Some wineries with very intimate tasting rooms, like C.C. Jentsch Cellars in Oliver, have temporarily done away with tastings altogether and only offer curbside pick up for their wines. Clos du Soleil winery in the Similkameen Valley ceased all tastings for the spring and have only recently opened their tasting bar by appointment. Since one of Clos du Soleil’s owners is Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C.’s Health Officer and unanimously heralded hero during this crisis, it stands to reason that Clos du Soleil’s small tasting room will be conducted with the utmost in social safety procedures in mind.

When small wineries do open for tastings, they will likely be by appointment only and with limits on group sizes. The ‘by appointment’ thing is still scary for some wine tourists although it really shouldn’t be. Wineries like Black Hills have been doing it that way for years, which has sometimes put them at odds with the more casual wine tourists who go there with equally casual expecations for a wine shop experience. To expect (or, as I have personally witnessed, rudely demand) free tastings of wine with little or no notice is no longer going to be the norm. Though they have had to reduce their total capacity and size of groups, relatively little appears to have changed for the Black Hills experience, showing just how ahead of their time they were in creating a unique experience.

Wineries are now forced to be creative with the rooms that they have, which in general, were all rooms designed with pre-Covid traffic patterns and customers in mind. This is where there is potential for the really creative wineries will shine. Here’s the Thing Vineyard on Black Sage Road has created designated In and Out doors and placed impossible-to-miss yellow tape on the floor for customers to stand behind when their wines are being poured. Owner Leah McDowell said that her customers have been completely fine with the possibility of extra wait times. The change in routine from the extra measure of social distancing (where the person pouring the tastings steps back from the bar before the customer can reach for it) is going to take people on both sides of the tasting bar to get used to. This is particularly true when there is no plexiglass separators, as McDowell has so far prefered not to install because she feels that it breaks that personal connection with her customers.

One thing that I am personally glad to see gone are the days of people crammed around a tasting bar in a wine shop of any size. When there are that many people, getting a real sense of the winery’s story or the wines’ details are almost impossible for customers to hear or wine shop staff to present. Holding the attention of that many people in any space, large or small, becomes extremely difficult and the experience is diminished. The great story about the history of the property and the way the winemaker may love this wine gets reduced to, “This is our Pinot Blanc!” shouted across the bar. That’s not an experience. That’s barn animals feeding at a trough. Making an appointment at a winery means that you will probably get the same great experience if they are busy or not.

Hester Creek has opted not to take appointments but they have the space and procedures in place to limit customers. So there is no appointment needed but you might be standing in line for a while. Black Hills takes appointments and they may not have times available when you are in the area, but you won’t have to wait long when you get a time. Will there be unanimity among wineries about how to do things? Not likely. For now, the casual style of wine touring may be temporarily set aside for a mixed bag of experience styles.  Each winery’s wines are unique and now their experiences will be too. Best to read the signs when you arrive and follow along with the procedures so that everyone stays safe.

And just in case you think the rules don’t apply to you, winery staff know that they are not obliged in any way to pour anything to anyone. So if you choose to use a wine shop to start ranting loudly about how the government is just using Covid to turn everyone in to commies, you will very likely be refused service of any alcohol.  Free speech is a right. Wine is not. It’s best that you move along.

Please Note: Spitting is problematic now since there is debate about the safety of spitting out wine into a spittoon. The wine shops that I’ve seen recently have all removed them or replaced them with plastic cups. One winery that I went to asked spittoon users to go outside of the wine shop or around the corner somewhere. The BCWI’s list of guidelines indicates procedures for spittoons but it seems that some wineries are removing them or otherwise limiting their use. Designated drivers or people touring solo have limited options for tasting wine now so please be away of that.

If you are wondering what wineries are open – Kayla from UncorkBC has compiled an excellent list of wineries and their availabilities for tastings. Click here to check it out!

And then there were the point scores, which I will save for another article.

I have been asked often why I don’t provide point scores or focus on wine reviews on this site. Here is the reason.

Wine Country BC started out of conversations that my late friend Aaron and I had while working at a wine store. We had always lamented the fact that BC wine at the time (2009) never received proper appreciation from reviewers. We often tasted wines that blew us away and really got us excited about the industry. More often than not, we found wine reviews for those same wines (with tasting notes and scores) that were less enthusiastic about it than we were. Wines that, for us, stood out in large trade tastings were given ‘meh’ status based on what the reviewer was saying. This got Aaron and I really annoyed (ok, probably more me than Aaron – he was always a cool cat about things like that) and that is how this blog got started.

Because we were not thrilled with wine reviews from others, we consciously did not include wine reviews or point scores in our podcasts or on our posts. Yes, we tasted and evaluated wines for sure but hopefully we made it clear that we were trying to be objective about it. Listeners to the podcast in particular could easily tell if we were excited by a particular wine or not. You could hear it in our voices, which is why the podcast medium fascinated me. Usually, the wines that we chose to feature were wines that at least one of us had already tried and knew would be interesting to some degree.

I did experiment briefly with pseudo wine reviews with a post category called TINAWR (This Is Not A Wine Review) but was still putting more emphasis in podcasting at that time rather than in writing.  The two reviews that I did most mimicked the podcast format more than anything and do not seem to be all that helpful to anyone in retrospect.

Fast-forward a few years to today and wine reviews for me on this site have become pretty much impossible. The reason? I have lived in the Okanagan now for almost ten years. I have worked at more than a few wineries in cellars, vineyards, and wine shops. I personally know and am friends on Facebook with many wine makers, winery owners, and people in the industry. They are friends. Their kids are the in the same grades as my kids. I see them at the post office, grocery store, or Canadian Tire.

So how is it that I could possibly take a wine, judge it by appearance, clarity, aroma, taste, and finish and accurately assess it with any degree of objectivity? To me, it’s no longer Chateau Booboo’s Merlot, it is Wayne’s or Bill’s or Ed’s merlot. I can’t. Not now and maybe not ever for Okanagan wine, at least as a writer of a blog or podcast producer.

What I can offer is exactly what I’ve been stating the whole time in my tagline to this blog: “Beyond the guided tour…” This is what real life in wine country is like. Wine is made by people, some really amazing people and some less amazing, and it is a way of life. It is a hard-working, 24/7, arduous, and repetitive way of life. It is farming and that’s what farming is. Farming is also a community and I often feel like I am part of it. Reading my blog, listening to the podcasts (which I’m hoping to get back into shortly), will take you into places in the wine industry that are not necessarily part of of what would be included in a tasting note, wine review, or article written from someone that comes here a few times a year or just once on a fam tour.

You’ll get to meet those people who are incredibly passionate about what they do.  I was lucky enough to meet many of them writing for for years for BC Food & Wine Trails magazine and then had the priviledge to do it again alongside John Schreiner for The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide 6th Edition, which was just released last April.

They make wine and each year, they try to make the best wine that they can. In wine country, there are no good or bad vintages. Each vintage offers something a little different and that is part of what makes wine so interesting. There are variations in cherries and apples too but nobody really notices those.

Those are all things that are a part of what it is about living in wine country.

Well, consider how much wine you go through over the course of a year. Most wine lovers (if you are reading this, then this probably applies to you) will probably have at least one bottle a week. That’s 52 bottles, 39 liters of wine, or 4.33 cases of wine per year and might seem laughably low to some of you. Yes, there are people who do not have big, beautiful patios and are not inundated with guests every evening of the week who drop by for non-stop wine-soaked socializing, and that’s ok. Some people just like to have a nice glass of wine with their dinner. How many trips to the liquor store does it take to buy those 52 bottles?

Wine clubs, particularly in the pandemic era that we are in, are a great way for wine lovers of all means to keep your wine stash stocked and ready for whenever you need it.  Here are a few reasons why wine clubs are hot right now:

1 . Stocking wine at home will keep you from having to make special trips to the store to get it when you need it. There is a reason why liquor stores in BC were allowed to stay open when most everything else shut down. Even though stores were still open, there weren’t a lot of people shopping in any given day. I used to love shopping. Now I don’t love it and try to avoid doing any small trips to get anything if I don’t have to. Keeping a good selection of wines really helped cut back on those barely-necessary trips to the liquor store. It is likely a waste of time and gas if buying those 52 bottles takes 52 trips.

2. The wine will taste more like it did in the wine shop when you tasted it. Have you ever returned from a wine tasting experience and opened a bottle of the wine that you loved the most only to find that it didn’t taste exactly the same as you remembered? It’s probably because the wine is in travel shock. The wine feels just as good as you did when you arrived home after traveling through 5 airports and 6 time zones without your favourite neck pillow. If you receive your wines from a wine club, you will be able to have a small stockpile of wines that are rested and ready for you whenever you choose.

3. It is the best way to support the wineries that you really love. If you love the wine you’re with, support the people who make it every year. Wine clubs are a winery’s most profitable sales channel. Even though that Merlot costs $25 at the government store or the supermarket, the winery will receive a higher percentage of that $25 if you buy it directly from them. Smaller wineries appreciate this more than you know, especially if their wine shops are small and they cannot accomodate the same number of visitors that they have in the past. Increasing their wine clubs and online sales is now a matter of survival for some of these wineries.  By joining a winery’s wine club, you are giving them your support in ways that transcend money.

So how you do choose the club that is right for you?

1.  Start with wineries that have wines that you know you already really like. This should be the most important factor. If the winery has a style that you love or that makes wines that suit the foods that you eat often, chances are you will love receiving their wines regularly. I’m a member at one club that has special wines that are only available to club members. That makes each shipment even more special!

2. Look for benefits that you will enjoy and can actually use. Some wine clubs have some great benefits that range from discounts on all purchases to special wines that are only available to wine club members. I used to manage one club that let you name a row of vines in their vineyard! Most offer some kind of perk for visiting them, usually free tastings for your group or a special tour of some kind. If you aren’t planning on coming to the Okanagan, these will be largely useless for you. Some wineries to special events for their members in other cities in the form of special dinners or meet ups. I suspect this will become more common since people may not be traveling as much as they used to.

3.  Choose a committment level that you can handle. Most wine clubs have very little committment requirements but some do. The usual minumum is to purchase about 12 bottles per year and I know of one high-end winery that requires only 6 bottles. If that sounds like a lot to purchase from one winery, consider your yearly total above in the second paragraph (52). Instead of buying them in 52 different trips to the liquor store, you are now purchasing more of them in one shot and you can even have them shipped right to you.

I’ve been managing wine clubs for 5 years and helped out with them for another 4 before that. I’ve been a member of a wine store’s club before but it wasn’t until last year that I actually joined a winery’s club. Now that I am a member of three clubs and enjoy the thrill of opening that box of wine when it arrives. Most wineries include in-depth tasting notes or information about the wines. One includes recipes with each shipment and another includes a hand-written thank you note, which I think is the ultimate in classiness because it shows that they really appreciate my business.

Advice for wineries: I have heard of wine clubs that include nothing but the wines. I’m not sure why this happens because in my opinion, that’s a great way to alienate your customers. Wine club members are the most loyal fanbase for your brand. You can be sure that every time one of those bottles are brought out to be enjoyed when guests come over, they are going to tell their friends where they got this wine. A wine club shipment is not just a box of twelve bottles of wine. It’s twelve opportunities for a loyal customer to tell their friends about your how much they love your winery.

Even if you still think that wine clubs are out of your league, this is a great time to try one out. Visit the website of a winery that you have enjoyed in the past, either in person or through their wines, and check out what they have to offer for their wine club.

Have you been a member of a wine club? Share your experiences, negative and positive, in the comments below.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

I don’t know how he does it.

But he has done it for at least 19 books now, 14 of which were on my shelf before this one arrived in the mail for me last week, just a day in advance of the official release of The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide, published by Touchwood Editions. This is the most current and authoritative book on the wine industry in BC’s interior. And when I say “current”, I mean that it was totally up to date. For about two days.

The book was released on April 28th. On Thursday April 30th, the  sale of Maverick Estate Winery went public, which threw that whole chapter out of date. John wrote about it on his blog.

Those two full days of being curent were a pretty good run. My own “Valleys of Wine” released last fall had elements that were out of date before it had even hit the press.  The altered incarnation of the Lt. Governor’s Awards for Excellence in Wine was the main culprit in that case, but there were also a few other things.

The point is that documenting anything is going to offer up its own challenges. If we had waited a month longer to publish, it would have been out of date just as quickly. In my opinion, if nothing had changed, it might indicate a sort of stagnation within the industry and that in itself would not be good. Change is often good. Unless Covid-19 is the reason, then it is probably not good. But, for the purposes of The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide, change is a sign that the industry is strong and in demand. And that is good.

In the uncertainty of the pandemic times surrounding our world, what the wine industry here is most scared of is the change in business model. Wineries are no longer going to be able to have patrons lined up 3 deep at their tasting bar. There might not even be enough people around to do that. Some things are probably going to change more than others.

What will not change (or at least, I hope will not change) is the British Columbian’s love and support of their local wine industry. In responding to questions for an article in a newspaper in my home province of Quebec, I noted that BC has had an incredibly supportive local market for almost 20 years. When I first visited BC for the Millenium New Years, I bought a bottle of Sumac Ridge sparkling wine to bring to the party. I knew little about wine and even less than little about BC wine but I remember that people at the party that night all new about Sumac Ridge and all knew that they made great wine. The local market here will likely support BC wineries but how they do it might change. Instead of touring around the Okanagan looking for new wineries, they will need to find out about them in other ways.

Perhaps a good book about all of those wineries would be helpful?

Click here to listen to a radio interview that I did with Brock Jackson on EZ Rock about The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide.

I posted this thought on my personal Facebook page a few days ago. “This may be the only time in my life that I’ve ever seen the world value something more than money.” It got a little attention and raised some discussion. As I said in a reply, “A little virus from China has suddenly rendered things that seemed important (professional sports, travel by airlines, concerts, etc.) less important. Environmental degradation couldn’t stop the NHL or grounded airplanes, but this virus has. Where 6 months ago, society would have only made decisions for economic reasons, we are now making them for health reasons.” Luxury manufacturers are retooling in the effort to fight this virus. Ferrari is making ventilators. Local distilleries are making hand sanitizer.

Political leaders whose entire lives have been spent chasing wealth (the best known of whom is not worth mentioning here, but everyone knows who I mean), now find their value system at odds with new priorities and they do not know how to cope. Decisions aren’t just labeled as dumb or moronic, they are now seen differently and clearly outside of the new social reality, almost to a point where we don’t know how to understand it. This is a dangerous time for any society, which only compounds the anxiety over the seemingly unfettered rampage of a deadly virus through the world’s population. Nobody is immune. Everyone is at risk. Cough once in public and suspicion is quickly focused on you.

The isolation we are now experiencing (some mandated, some self-isolating) is going to create a real cultural shift in how we conduct our lives. This is where the wine industry right now is panicking. Wineries, particularly those in BC who don’t export and how are dependent on visitors to their wine shops (tourism), are not sure what to do. John Schreiner has posted two extremely helpful articles that summarize the situation.

One quotes heavily from an email by Sandra Oldfield, former winemaker and owner at Tinhorn Creek, with industry-specific suggestions to help weather the storm. She has experienced the devastation to the industry after 9/11 and various forest fires over the years and has always had a clear vision for the industry. Her prediction; “Tourism will be impacted to an even greater extent because during this crisis, even locals may start staying away from wine touring. In contrast, after 911 the locals seemed to still support our industry and it was mainly the international tourists that stayed away.” She makes 5 main suggestions for wineries to help weather the storm of this crisis. Her goal is to help the BC wine industry as whole and, though it was not in her game plan, her departure from Tinhorn in 2017 thankfully means that all of BC wine is now the beneficiary of her wisdom and experience.

In the second article, John writes about the reaction of wineries with the proliferation of online shipping promotions. To generate sales, many wineries are offering free shipping to customers across the country. Judging from wineries’ social media feeds, this appears to be working. But is it profitable or sustainable over the long-term? That is something that we will have to wait and see. Wineries can’t just give things away for free. Shipping costs money and that can’t be swallowed as a cost forever. I used to get given a lot of wine, often enough that when choosing wines for dinner, I started only pulling bottles from my cellar that were given to me. The idea was that I would blow through the free wine in a couple of weeks, have a giggle at how quickly I used my free wine, go back to the wines that I’d purchased myself, and recognize how lucky I was to have all this free wine.

Something weird happened. I ended up giving up after a few months because I never ran out of free wine. At some point, I forgot about it altogether. It wasn’t the hefty challenge that I thought that it was going to be. This doesn’t happen much anymore (sadly, in some ways) because I don’t write for that publication anymore and (for better or worse) I am not offered wine for free as often anymore. I also offer to buy wine more often because I want to support the winery as much as I can. It is worth noting that most of the wines were given to me were from wineries who are either now no longer in business or whose owners have sold and moved on. I never assumed that any winery was going to give me wine for free, but I have met other writers who do have that expectation. Will consumers could begin to expect free shipping from now on? How about supporting a winery that covers their costs to allow them to make a living? It’s not as sexy for marketing but hopefully consumers will understand that after this CoVid-19 situation has settled.

So, where does that leave us now? If we weren’t utterly dependent on social media before, we most certainly are now. It could be the lifeline that has helped people in isolation or quarantine stay connected with loved ones. It could be the fastest access to current information on the situation. It could also be the thing that distracts us enough to trivialize the changes in our society such as we miss out on making good decisions in the future. This is where we need to be careful. It has been proven years ago that social media platforms can deliberately alter the moods of its users. Let’s keep social media around to inform ourselves but make decisions based on keeping ourselves (and our fellow humans) and our businesses healthy. There has got to be a balance there somewhere.

I also never would have thought that by 2020 I’d have published a book about wine – “Valleys of Wine”. Somehow, it happened. And as of next April, I will have my name on another book, the 6th edition of John Schreiner’s Okanagan Wine Tour Guide.

At the moment, I am procrastinating from completing my comments on the final edits. Because I own 3 previous editions of this very book (as well as at least 10 other books by John), I catch myself reading it with the same wine fanboy reverie that I’ve had for the past two decades instead of doing what I’m supposed to be doing, which is a search-and-destroy mission for typos, grammatical no-no’s, errant punctuation, or other literary faux-pas of which anyone is capable when writing about wine. This is the last chance to make changes and if anything gets through at this stage, we have to live with it just like I have to live with the couple of goofs that I’ve caught recently in “Valleys of Wine”.

So why bother typing this out instead of focusing on the task at hand?

Because books like this always seem to get me excited about the wine industry that we have here in BC. Though this one focuses on the Okanagan Valley, there are other regions lumped in as well. It should really be thought of as a book about wineries in the interior rather than just the Okanagan because it does include wineries in other places, like Kamloops, Creston, and Nakusp (spoiler alert) among others. After spending the past 5 years of my creative life looking backwards at the history of BC’s wine industry, it’s exciting to me to be looking forward for once.

There is a lot to look forward too. It seems that there is a book renaissance happening now with the publication of many amazing books about wine and culinary topics. If one of your resolutions is to read more, 2020 is not going to disappoint you with a bad selection of available books. Though I’m still going through my stack of books that I’ve had to hold off on reading while I’ve been writing over the past couple of years, I am finding myself distracted with all kids of amazing volumes. Shane M. Chartrand and Jennifer Cockrall-King’s book “Tawâw” is a stunning cookbook. (It’s cool to just read a cookbook, right?) And I can’t wait for the upcoming release of Jennifer Schell’s new book, “The BC Wine Lovers Cookbook” which, based on her previous books (like “The Butcher, The Baker, the Wine and Cheese Maker”), means this is going to be on a whole other level of amazing.

Kevin Begos’s “Tasting the Past” is probably the most important wine book I’ve read in a long time and I highly recommend that every wine lover read it cover to cover. The reason? It will totally reset your point of view regarding why we assume that particular grape varieties (i.e. the “Vitis Vinifera Greatest Hits” varieties like Merlot, Chardonnay, et al) as being the de facto kings and queens of the wine world. Suddenly after reading it, the hegemony of the European grapes in the world of wine as we know it today doesn’t seem so secure anymore. Maybe there are other grape varieties that are perhaps less “noble” (a very European aristocratic term) but can still produce quality wines if grown in the right place. Perhaps growing these “noble” European grapes in every corner of the world capable of growing grapes is never going to make great wine in any of them and that we are missing the point by trying? Maybe we should be looking for what grows there naturally and accept it rather than trying to shoehorn a grape variety into a terroir where it clearly doesn’t belong and has no chance? These are the questions that Begos poses throughout his book and it is zeitgeist-altering to say the least.

Suffice to say that the literary landscape for wine lovers is looking pretty good for 2020. With recent releases proffering some amazing new thoughts on our industry in light of things like climate change, technology (new and old), and the increasing focus on buying local first, it’s great to see that Google hasn’t totally been able to quantify our thoughts into its algorithms. Even blogs (*gasp*) don’t hold the keys to unlimited casual insider knowledge that they once (may) have had. It is comforting that books like this are still being released and hopefully, they will be taken a lot more seriously than a page of search results or social media memes.

Of course, when it finally does happen, I will first in line to hover-convert my Subaru and I will read a book while I wait for the mechanics to finish.

Hello BC wine lovers in BC Wine-Lover Land!

This is my first post in over a year and a half. Writing this seems a little bit weird given all of the changes that have happened to me over the past few years. Aside from some significant personal changes, my book, “Valleys of Wine” has now been published and is available for sale at many fine retailers in the Okanagan and online! While we’re on that topic, let’s start with it.

Valleys of Wine

This is the first published comprehensive history of the wine industry in BC since Alex Nichol’s book “Wines and Vines of British Columbia” in 1983. It took 5 years from start to finish and represents a lot of primary research with interviews and snooping around public archives across BC. When I was in the thick of writing it, I described the process of writing a non-fiction book as “studying a full grown tree from the roots to the branches with a microscope and then writing about a single leaf”.  There were so many interesting tangents that I started to follow that could have been included but in the end, were not entirey relevant to the topic. As it is, the first draft of the manuscript was 174,000 words. My editor Charlene Dobmeieir  gracefully paired it back to 140,000 and fine-tuned that focus a little more. Robin Mitchell Crendfield’s book design made it look beautiful, professional, and something that would look great among other wine books on the shelf.

The book arrived at my house on October 24th, which is not an insignificant day for me as it was the 4th anniversary of the passing of a dear friend of mine, Aaron Olfert, who started Wine Country BC with me.  The book is also dedicated to him and for it to arrive on the anniversary of his passing was not lost on me. I am always thankful for the hours of podcasts that I have on this blog that contain his voice. I listened to them now and then whenever I would get stuck on writing a particular part because he was one of those people that could take something complicated like wine and explain it simply. Aaron knew that I was writing this book and we talked about it when I saw him the day before he passed.

I’ve been very lucky to have some great people write articles about the book’s release and some of the events that I’ve done around promoting it;

Gonzo Okanagan (by Roslyne Buchanan)

InWine (by Jennifer Schell)

Summerland Review (by John Arendt)

Kelowna Now (by Laura Milnes)

I have done a few casual talks about it through the past couple of months and even a tasting seminar at the BC Wine Information Centre (which featured some historically important wines).

Unfortunately, the book arrived just a couple of weeks after I had finished my short course on BC wine history at Okanagan College, where it would have made a perfect textbook. That course is something that I look forward to teaching every year and features a more involved historical tasting which clearly shows just how far the industry has come.

A common question that comes to me is, “What is the next book going to be about?” To which I reply, “We shall see.”

This Site

While I had planned (and started) to update this site by changing its format slightly, I have retained my original WordPress site. I really missed writing about the wines, wineries, and people that I have been meeting lately and that outlet (in the new format) becamse to cumbersome to maintain. This format makes it easier to use and, after just over a decade of using it, it is still the most familiar to me at this point.

What will I be writing about? More of the same, with a little more of the new – new wineries, new wines, new experiences, new discoveries. In July of 2018, I returned to work at the BC Wine Information Centre in Penticton, which is where I was when I first started Wine Country BC in 2009. I am lucky that I was able to return to that same perspective on the industry that I missed when I was working at wineries. Working at a winery meant that I had to focus only on that winery’s products. While this was good to do, and challenging in a different way, it wasn’t always interesting for me. I liked being in touch with the biger picture, the context of wine in the whole province. I wanted to know what was happening everywhere in the world of BC wine and working at a store like the BC Wine Info Centre gave me that perspective again.

I should be clear everything I write or say here is completely my own opinion and perspective and does not represent anything from any of the places that I work or have worked. This is and has always been a personal blog filled with my own opinions. I sell wine at work, not here. Back in the podcasting days, I always tried to make sure that we didn’t say anything about any of the places where we worked. All of the people that appeared on the podcast worked for a winery or were in the industry in some way, but we were not selling anything and I (as the only one left from those days) are not selling any particular wine or brand. (Although I am now selling a book, so there is that slight change…)

Which leads me to another topic that I get asked about…

Podcasts

When I started Wine Country BC, it was meant to be a podcast. I didn’t give a boo about writing anything but found it necessary to write something down in order to have a platform to post the podcasts. The posts at the beginning reflected that, such as this great example that contains a total of exactly one sentence. How times have changed.

I am sometimes asked if I am going to start podcasting again and the answer is always, “I would really like to.” Now that podcasts are not foreign concepts anymore like they were in 2009 and people can play them in their cars, this seems like a great time to come back with a wine podcast. Though I was not the first (David Bond’s BC Winecast was the first in 2007), I thought that we were able to contribute something to the conversation about BC wine at a time when it was not being adequately served in online media. Traditional print and radio were still dominant and the online world hadn’t quite figured itself out yet. That is not the case today and listening to a podcast or sharing an online article is far easier than it was back in the days of early social media.

What is still the case today is that it takes a lot of time to produce a resonable sounding podcast. I estimated that every 10 minutes of podcast time that you heard took about an hour of production time to complete. Since Wine Country BC was a long-form podcast with the average episode lasting 30-45 minutes, it was a lot of work and a lot of time. That became time that I just didn’t have anymore beginning in 2014 when I started research for Valleys of Wine (see above if you skipped that part).

Along with it being time-consuming, I was also frustrated that there wasn’t a really good way to tell if anyone was hearing it. When I asked some of the people who regularly appeared on it if they had ever listened to it, most of them said no. In addition, after spending about a half-hour  interviewing a winery at an event, I turned off my audio recorder and thanked them for taking the time to talk to me. They replied with “Hey, thanks for the free publicity!” That put a sour taste in my mouth from then on about what I was doing and how much work I was willing to do for “free publicity” for a winery. Something needed to change and stopping production on the podcasts was the first thing to go.

Will I do them again? Maybe. I love the podcast medium and would take it on again if I could. I know that there are better podcasting platforms out there that are easier and that return more stats to me. I have considered some of them seriously. For me at this point, considering the balance of time investments, this WordPress site will suffice for my blogging needs.

So what will this site be about if there are not going to be any podcasts?

Reviews

Well, not exactly like you’re probably used to seeing them. I’ve written about what I think of wine reviews before here and other places. I don’t like wine scores but undestand why they are useful. I know what a good wine is but also know that my own preferences might creep their way into any evaluation of them, no matter how much I may try to keep that from happening.

In addition, there is also the fact that I live and work here in wine country. Some of the people who make these wines are dear friends of mine. Can I possibly give a proper critical tasting note of a wine that way? What if the wine is awful? Would I want to call them out on making a crap bottle wine? No, I wouldn’t. What would be the point in doing that anyway? The weird thing with wine reviews is that they really don’t matter. Critics, wine writers and bloggers can pan a wine all they want, yet to somebody out there, it could be their favourite wine in the world. What is the point of knocking them down or making them feel lesser about it? Some of those wines are made by very good people whose lives depend on selling those same wines. Why would I want to belittle their efforts? I don’t.

Plus, who cares what I think about a wine?

What I would like to offer is part of my experiences with visiting wineries, enjoying BC wines, and meeting some of the amazing people that make them. I figure that over the years, I have personally visited about 90% of the wineries in this province so far. There are some really cool wineries out there. There is the winery that  has rescue goats named after the cast of Friends. There is the first winery to open in the Arrow Lakes region that I visited last summer. There is a winery that is making wine from untrellised grape vines. How exciting are these places to visit and meet the people behind them? VERY! Those are the things that I want to tell you about here and what I hope will become the focus of this site going foward.

Until then, I hope that you will all pick up your copy of Valleys of Wine so that you can learn about the sometimes crazy, often weird, and certainly fun history of our province’s wine industry. There are some great wines out there to discover and I will be sharing some of the ones that I’ve enjoyed soon.

Happy sipping!

~Luke

First of all, let me say how much I miss you all and miss contributing to this blog that I started 9 and half years ago now! I have been going a little slower on producing posts and have stopped with podcasting altogether when I started writing my book on BC wine’s history. I am happy to report that the book is now in its editing phase and will hopefully be released this coming fall.

Thank you for listening and reading over the years! Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

When wineries take chances with things, there is also a possibility that things can go sideways, perhaps more so. The fun part is taking the risk because one never knows what will happen until they try. If, over the history of humanity, nobody tried anything, we would all still be living in caves and swinging clubs at each other.  Unfortunately, there are so few wineries that take these kinds of risks. Even though there are more wineries in BC each year, it seems that a declining percentage of them are willing to experiment a little. Of course simply starting a winery is already fraught with enough of a financial risk that most owners understandably want to mitigate against disaster as much as possible.

Noble Ridge has taken chances with their sparking program and the results have been really cool to watch.  It is pretty clear that they can produce wines of profundity, nuance, and complexity across their whole portfolio. But is there consistency across these vintages of their sparkling wines? I recently had a chance to taste 3 consecutive vintages of “The One” sparkling wine (technically the 2013 was The Wild One” – more on that later) and the experience was truly memorable.

The One 2012

This is the big One. The One that won all of those awards. After popping the cork and taking the first sips, it was pretty clear as to why this wine stood out. It had a beautiful light golden colour and I found that the nose was full of bready-yeasty aromas, baked pear, caramel, delicate floral notes (daisies), and green apple skin. The wine appeared relatively dry, crisp acidity, light alcohol, and I noticed flavours of bright pears, brioche, and ripe lemon rind. The finish was medium in length and completely pleasant to the last.

This wine was a cogent, complete statement and set the bar rather high for the two wines that were going to follow it. The One 2012 had everything – complexity, nuance, appealing flavours, balance, texture, and beautiful bubbles throughout. This is one instance where the judges at the various competitions (The Lieutenant Governor’s Awards, All Canadians, Wine Align, etc…) were all on the same page and got it right by giving this wine top marks.

Did it set the bar too high for the following wines? It certainly made the task a little more difficult…

The Wild One 2013

This wine intrigued me from the start and, of the three wines, this was the one that I was the most eager to taste. They took a big risk with producing this wine in this way and for me, as a semi-professional wine nerd, I was looking forward to it.

How exactly does one do a second fermentation using wild yeasts?

Wild yeast fermentations are done using the yeasts that are present on the grape skins. The fermentation started spontaneously in barrels or in tanks. The whole process is maddeningly slow and can go off the rails in many different ways. For this reason, most wineries prefer to use cultured yeasts which can perform more consistently and predictably.

Sparkling wine made with the traditional method goes through two fermentations – one (the primary fermentation) happens normally in a large vessel (tank, vat,  or barrel) and the secondary fermentation happens in the bottle. The secondary fermentation is what gives the wine its bubbles because the carbon dioxide that the yeast produces is trapped in the bottle so it dissolves into the wine. A wild yeast fermentation is easy enough to accomplish for the primary fermentation because the skins are there and it an easy environment for yeast to survive. But how can it happen once the wine is securely locked away in a bottle and surrounded by alcohol that make it hard for the yeast to survive?

This is where the real risk comes in. Noble Ridge’s winemaker Benoit Gauthier informed me that the wines were bottled with the regular dosage that included sugar and yeast nutrients, but no yeast at all! Instead, he relied on the yeasts present in the air of the winery and that may have survived through the primary fermentation. It was incredibly risky to do this because there was a real possibility that no fermentation would occur at all (something that did happen with more than a few bottles).

So what’s in the glass? Well, it was pale yellow in colour and had very tiny bubbles. I found the wine to be extremely aromatic with a strong yeast / autolytic character, concrete dust, lemon rind, dried bitter herbs, dried flowers, and wet straw.

The next part was what I was waiting for – how much sugar was there going to be in this one? The spec sheet for this wine states that there will be significant bottle variations in residual sugar because of the unpredictability of the wild yeasts present in each bottle. The range that they stated went from 5 to 15g/l, which is a not a small variation. Even people with casual tasting abilities would be able to tell the difference between a wine with 5g or 15g of sugar. My particular wine sample appeared to be dry. Very dry, in fact. Desert-like is another way of putting it. It made me think of the Okanagan in the summer kind of dry. I like that but some people might not. I left a small glass of it out to get flat and tasted it again the following day which confirmed to me that my wine was absolutely on the drier end of the spec sheet’s range. While it gives the wine a cool, adventurous, and unpredictable attitude (dare I say, “wild”), food pairings could be a bit difficult with this wide a spectrum to play with. Some chefs or sommeliers might think twice before listing this on their menu for that reason however it is unlikely that this wine will appear in any restaurant as I am told that Noble Ridge is only selling it to the wine club and in the wine shop.

Beyond that, the wine was medium in acidity and body and had a delicate, creamy mousse. I found flavours of this wine to be slightly bitter with lemons, bitter herbs, and lemon cough drops / medicinal flavours, which was followed by a very long and pleasant finish.

The Wild One 2013 seemed to raise more questions than anything else. The bitterness on the palate was a bit off-putting at first and I wonder if that might have been lessened with a sweeter version of the wine. Giving it the “Wild” name is certainly an appropriate moniker. This wine will appeal to those who look for unpredictable styles from their wines. I am one of those people and for me, a good part of this wine’s enjoyment was the anticipation of the experience in tasting it. Unfortunately, the only preconceived notion that I’d had about it was that it had to compete against the 2012 from the previous evening. That is a position that would be difficult for any wine to live up. Given the choice between the three of these to purchase again, The Wild One would make my list every time just because of the anticipated adventure with every bottle.

The One 2014

The third wine in the flight was a return to The One, but without the Wild things from the previous vintage. This wine was again in the unfortunate situation of having to live up to the 2012 with inevitable comparisons. Could this wine cruise at the same level?

This wine was a pale gold colour with a light tinge of salmon colour and was almost like one would expect from a Pinot Gris. There was a persistent mousse with tiny bubbles. I found the nose to have aromas of fresh-baked French bread, lemons, green apple skins, thyme, mandarin peel, Orange Julius, pears, and minerals.

On the palate, this wine was the sweetest of the trio although, at a stated 7.6g/l residual sugar, it isn’t going to be winning any sweetness competitions. There was some good acidity to balance it and a soft mousse. I found flavours of ripe tangerines, tropical fruits / mango, flowers, soft wet minerals, and some medicinal flavours. There was no bitterness on this wine at all like there had been on the Wild One 2013. The wine had a medium-length finish but I found that the bubbles subsided rather quickly. Over the course of the meal that accompanied it, the wine kind of lost it’s mojo the longer it sat in the glass. Bubbles got fewer and farther between.

The contrast between The One 2014 and The Wild One 2013 was huge, almost like they were from two different wineries. I see the 2014 as a crowd-pleasing sparkler that will appeal to many different palates without offending anyone whereas the 2013 will be more polarizing and have definite friends and enemies.

Conclusions

For people looking for absolute consistency in style or flavour from year to year, Noble Ridge’s sparkling wines may not be for you. For adventurous, small-batch, boutique, sparkling wine lovers who look for new taste sensations with every bottle, you should really add Noble Ridge to your list. They are clearly capable of making some top-drawer wines like the 2012 and are able to handle adventures and experiments like the 2013.

One thing that did stick out for me is purely visual – the packaging. I have a friend (and Wine Country BC podcast co-host) who collects sparkling wine caps. Some of them are beautifully designed and branded. For a $40 sparkling wine, I expected to see some additional visual elements to these wines beyond a plain silver cap under the wire cage. Yes, it does match the silver colour scheme, but for a wine in this price point, a simple, branded top would make the presentation a little more elegant.

In sum, if you are an adventure-seeking sparkling wine enthusiast, Noble Ridge’s sparkling wine program is waiting for you to discover.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

Cider historically has always been a part of our beverage production history in BC. The Okanagan has been known for growing apples for over 140 years. The name of the first commercial winery in BC survives today on bottles of cider. Cider has even rescued the finances of large commercial wineries like Calona and Mission Hill at various points in their histories. Cider, it seems, has always just been there in BC.

Perhaps it is somewhat bizarre then that cider has traditionally been at the bottom end of the sales statistics in the BC Liquor store statistics on sales. Cider was first indicated as a separate category in 1967 in the Liquor Control Board’s (as it was then known) 46th Annual Report. In that year, cider sales measured 0.14% of the nearly $156 million in total sales. By 1990, cider had crept up to account for just over 2% of total sales. By 2004, cider was holding steady at 5%. The category was renamed “Refreshments” in the following year which likely means that other little bottles of fizzy boozes (Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, etc) had probably been lumped into the cider category for some time before that.  In the most recent report for 2016-2017, “Refreshments” is holding steady at 6% of total sales where it had been since the previous year. (Interestingly, this same report shows that wine had overtaken beer to represent the largest percentage in  total sales for the first time ever at 35%!)

Growers‘ line of ciders is the most ubiquitous brand across the country. Developed in the 1950’s by Dr. John Bowen and F.A. Atkinson at the Summerland Research Station, the Growers’ Wine Company in Victoria purchased the recipe in 1962 and took over production. Fast-forward through the corporate ownership history to today and Growers’ remains in production at Arterra Wines Canada, where it is distributed nationally. The product line now includes a wide variety of fruit flavours and are all off-dry in style. In the late 1990s, the Growers’ cider brand was a common site in my university dorms’ recycling bins on any given Monday morning. Though I don’t recall trying it at the time, I had many friends who experienced some very rough mornings because of it, and other newer, but similarly sweet, bottled beverages. Even now, the Growers’ ciders are far to sweet for my palate but I can see how they would be appealing and approachable to a lot of people. The late 1990s was also the era when products like Mike’s Hard Lemonade made its debut and gave people alternatives to beer. This is the product category that is now called “refreshments”.

Smaller cider producers started popping up in the past decade and cider has really started to take off. Occasionally good bars would have Strongbow from the UK but there were not usually a lot of choices. Merridale Cider in Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island has been slowly making its way since 1990. The Okanagan has a growing scene too (ha – get it?) and has even caught the attention of cider-focused websites like this one.  BC Tree Fruits, the apple-packing co-op, has even gotten into the act with a line of ciders called Broken Ladder. They even have a tasting room and retail space just down the road from the Sandhill wine shop in Kelowna. Cider is in every LRS and government liquor store. In the Oliver government store, there are three full fridges dedicated to cider! So, who’s fault is it that cider has now become so popular in BC?

For me personally, I put the blame squarely on Wards from Kelowna. If their cider wasn’t so damn aromatic, perfectly balanced, and so utterly refreshing, then I probably would never have bothered with cider in the first place! Wards has a wine connection of course through The View Winery and Vineyard, a winery that has been featured many times on this site (notably here, here, here, and here). Ward’s cider is distinctly drier and more aromatic than the basic level cider and, to my tastes, is a beautiful, complex beverage that keeps me interested with ever sip.

So is cider just the latest hipster beverage that will fade away as soon as something else comes along? To answer that, you’d probably have to ask an actual hipster. (My beard is just not long enough.) I think that as long as there are producers who are interested and capable of producing a quality cider, there really is no reason why cider can’t have a long shelf life in BC.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

So what is going on here? What is happening to #bcwine?

Consolidation. This has been talked about more often over the past 5 years within the industry as the logical next step. Talking to winery owners, wine makers, and managers, I heard a lot of talk about consolidation being the thing that is probably just going to happen. And now it has started.

It seems like wineries are making money hand over fist but the reality might surprise many consumers. Making wine is an agricultural business and, like all agricultural businesses, the profit margins are not always that amazing. The only difference between an American corn farmer, a Canadian dairy farmer, and a small BC winery is that the first two (particularly the American one) are heavily subsidized by governments while the grape grower is essentially penalized with taxes (particularly in BC). American corn farmers would not be able to survive without the US federal government doling out money to make them profitable. To continue making wine, small wineries are reaching an end point, for various reasons, and to go beyond that they need investment from bigger companies. As former owner David Enns said in the press release, Laughing Stock had “reached the tipping point both in terms of scale and demand”.

BC wine seems to be attractive now to the large commercial wineries, of which there are now only three major players – Arterra Wines Canada,  Andrew Peller Ltd., and Mission Hill. Other than at a select few people in BC’s wine history (Bob Holt and Don Triggs come to mind), commercial wineries were never interested in the small scale of boutique winery operations in any serious way until this year.  It seems that without growing via quantity, the commercial wineries are now trying to follow where the market has been going (for decades now, some might argue) which is towards higher quality wines. No company wants to be the one left holding the portfolio of plonk, cheap and cheerful though it may be. For a while, it was looking like that’s exactly what was going to happen, particularly for Arterra, which inherited brands that are arguably shadows of their former selves after years of neglect at the hands of Constellation.

In that sense, Arterra’s purchase of Laughing Stock is a smart move and probably just the beginning. Laughing Stock is not a huge winery (10,000 cases) and has the respect of the wine cognoscenti but nowhere near the reach of a winery like Black Hills. Sales of Portfolio or Blind Trust could not possibly hope to make anything more than a tiny blip on the revenue charts  of the parent company. I suspect that Arterra is not done shopping in BC just yet and there are certainly more wineries out there for the pickings, especially for boutique wineries with owners who are approaching retirement age. With Laughing Stock’s purchase, half of Grand Crus that I listed in my article from 2014 are now under the ownership of a large wine company.

What does this mean for consumers? In the short term, I suspect nothing although availability and visibility of some products will change and maybe even for the better. Laughing Stock’s wines were not always easy to find so perhaps access to larger distribution channels and more sales staff will make some of these wines more widely available or at least better positioned.

As for wine quality, I suspect that Arterra will try to keep the wines as intact as possible for a number of years. As long as the Enns family is involved in making those decisions, there’s no reason to suspect otherwise. The big unknown is how Arterra will handle itself in the Canadian wine industry. Arterra is owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, an investment management company that also includes various European airports, American toll roads, crematoria, and an Australian desalination plant among other investments in its portfolio. Can Arterra make all of those sales charts go up to please the investors?  We shall see. Ultimately, how successful they are will determine wether Laughing Stock’s future as a Grand Cru of BC wine will continue or not.

Cheers from wine country.

~Luke

The irony of writing an article like this on a wine blog is not lost on me in any way. I am a huge fan of irony – got the poster, seen the show, own the DVD – and that is why I am hoping that maybe this might get people thinking a little bit more about it. People in the wine industry are all trained through the Serving It Right program, an irritating but necessary course that every person who wants a job serving alcohol in this province must take. We are trained to know the law and what to do in various circumstances  and now we now must be re-certified every five years to stay current. If it helps keep people informed, I’m all in. It is not a bad thing to be thinking about this beyond the online exam. A recent article in the Globe and Mail by André Picard summarized the way that we “romanticize” alcohol in Canada while scrutinizing opioids, marijuana, and other nebulously legal / illegal drugs. Alcohol, according to Picard, is “too often portrayed as good, harmless fun.”

Lots of people have an amazing ability to drink often and well because alcohol in some form is easy to find. People promote their lifestyle on social media and when visiting wineries. (I do that, of course. You are reading some of it now.) But sometimes they make jokes, which to me seems to trivialize it. I have often heard people say, “We NEVER have any wine left over in our house! Ha-ha!” (Ha-hah, yes. Good one.) They buy t-shirts with funny slogans on them proclaiming their love of wine. (Oh, the doctor says you need “glasses” – so funny.) They mock wine sales professionals such as myself for spitting out wines when we taste, calling it ‘alcohol abuse’, and then laughing with their friends. (Hysterical! Did you just make that up yourself? I’ve never heard that before…)

I think that these cavalier attitudes may be masking something potentially more harmful.

Drinking has always been a part of life everywhere I’ve lived and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it in moderation. Alcoholic beverages are perfectly natural, safe to drink, and preferable in most circumstances, especially when traveling. As we learned from North America’s great ‘college-experimental-phase’ with Prohibition almost a century ago, trying to ban it altogether is like trying to ban precipitation and is clearly futile. Prohibition resulted in the complete opposite effects, namely even more consumption, binge drinking, clandestine alcohol production, and dangerous situations to drink. Furthermore, the only alcohol that was available was potentially more harmful because it was coming from a completely unregulated, illegal industry.

Legal alcohol industry or not, some people have an inability to stop drinking once they start. That’s where we get some of the social problems that come from real alcohol abuse (not the spitting-out-at-a-wine-tasting kind). According to a World Health Organization chart on alcohol abuse rates throughout the world, Canada has a total rate of 7.35% of the population (5.43% men and 1.92% women). If we take the population of BC as 4,683,139 as of July 2015, that means that there are over 344,210 people who potentially have problems with alcohol. Some of those people will get treatment for their dependence and some won’t. Regardless of whether genetics plays a part in it or not, the fact remains that some people are going to have issues no matter who they are or where they live. As a former politician who used to be in charge of liquor laws in the late 1970s once put it to me, generally “80 percent of the people are fine with alcohol, 20 percent are not. But it’s the 20 percent that cause 80 percent of the problems.”

And now those people (7.35 percent to – yes, it is a stretch –  20 percent) have massive new wine displays in select B.C. supermarkets lording over them as they go through the checkout lines. In some stores, they are clearly visible from anywhere outside of the main aisles. It is simply impossible to ignore. Many people mentioned this aspect of it in comments on Minister John Yap’s blog which was ostensibly used to solicit peoples’ opinions on the matter. A surprising number of people cited social concerns – minors that work in the stores, recovering alcoholic family or friends, or simply that B.C. already has too many convenient places to buy alcohol already – as a reason to not allow wine in grocery stores.

These opinions were pretty decisively ignored. Most of the people commenting in favour of wine in grocery stores cited mere convenience, as if it was a “no-brainer” that since they already sell cigarettes, they might as well have wine too. That is some good quality internet argument logic for you that would only sound more natural if it was accompanied by an unruly mob carrying pitch-forks and torches. I guess since a store already sells car tires, they might as well sell puppies too. “I mean really, that’s the no-brainer to me,” they said. Calling the restrictions on selling wine in a grocery store “archaic” does not really make sense either since there really isn’t anything to do with modernizing anything.  Does that mean to be truly modern means that any store should be able to sell alcohol? Does true ‘modernization’ mean that anything goes and that all stores should be free to sell absolutely anything that they want? What about firearms? Puppies, booze, and ammo all together in one stores sounds like a good business idea to me! Offer it as drive through and I’ll be the first in line! (Hi! I’d like a bottle of Southern Comfort, the cute little white poodle, and a Glock G43 please.)

When Vancouver city council recently voted to allow wine in grocery stores (with many restrictions), it prompted a few new complaint articles like this that bemoan the “nanny state” and how the wine drinker is ultimately being repressed somehow because of “anti-liberalization”. The author, David Fine, cites Washington State and Quebec as having fewer alcohol-related health issues than BC and complains again about the government restrictions on alcohol. Of course, he doesn’t mention the fact that the drinking age in Washington is 21 (how’s that for a government “anti-liberal” restriction?) and in Quebec is technically 18 (but, as I know from personal experience, is less an actual restriction and more of a suggestion). These places have vastly different attitudes towards alcohol compared to BC. Washington State is far more policed in general than BC while Quebec’s alcohol culture is historically ingrained.

It’s not that I have anything against selling wine in grocery stores, I don’t. I grew up in Quebec where there is wine in grocery stores, corner stores, and government stores. Quebec holds the record for the shortest Prohibition in North America (less than 1 year – it was both enacted and repealed in 1919). I love going camping in Washington State and I agree that getting wine in the supermarkets is absolutely convenient when picking up supplies. But why should my own convenience put someone else’s health potentially at risk? Convenience is not a “no-brainer” that should be “modernized” and free of the “nanny state”. That’s just being selfish. Plain and simple.

We should also note that in Washington State and Quebec, the wine displays are not as obtusely crowned in the centre of the store as they are in BC grocery stores. Wines are on the shelf next to the crackers somewhere down aisle 6 and have no more attention drawn to it than Cheez Whiz or laundry detergent. My problem is not with the law or the alcohol culture in B.C., it is the way that we are lionizing it. By putting alcohol (so far, only wine and cider but, in reality, that door is now open) in such a prominent display in our grocery stores, we are no longer promoting just a product but a lifestyle. Those are two very different things.

When was alcohol ever really that inconvenient for the under 45 generation anyway? Do we really need more convenient wine purchasing locations above and beyond the hundreds of licensed retail stores, government stores, and private wine stores that we already have? At one point, the Town of Oliver (the Wine Capital of Canada) had more liquor retail stores than traffic lights and that’s not counting the wineries’ own wine shops that are not inconveniently close by. In all of the towns in BC where I’ve lived in 17 years here (five towns so far), finding a liquor store close by has never, ever been a problem. I have always lived within walking distance of some kind of liquor store.

Why do we need to put massive signs around high-profile wine displays in grocery stores? Is it because we feel that BC wine cannot compete unless it has this absolutely dominating marketing presence that completely outsizes other grocery departments like the bakery, deli, or fresh produce? Are we that insecure about our industry’s competitiveness? My point is not so much that it shouldn’t be sold in supermarkets, but why do they have to get the star treatment with huge signs and a central display? I’ve never seen that kind of booze promotion anywhere else.

When I lived in Quebec, there was a distinct difference in quality between the wines in each type of location. On the wine continuum from plonk to grand cru, the government stores carried the top quality on down to the decent, inexpensive wines. The supermarkets carried less expensive wines that are probably imported in bulk and bottled locally to look like imported wines. The corner stores (called dépanneurs in Quebec) like 7-11 carry bottles that are probably barely legally wine, and some of them probably skim that name pretty tightly. Essentially, if you want the good stuff, the government store or winery wine shops are where it’s at. (There is a growing band of brave vignerons in Quebec.)

From my point of view, putting real, VQA-certified, B.C. wines into supermarkets is a step in the wrong direction. It is forcing BC wine down the throats of consumers needlessly and we are starting to see it get stratified naturally through the ultimate expression of economics – market demand. Now that the super markets have to purchase their wines outright, they are being much more careful about the wines that they choose to carry. That means that if it doesn’t sell, it’s not going to re-ordered and the wine selection will get winnowed. The private LRS stores located nearby (sometimes sharing a parking lot with these stores) are hoping for this because they will pick up on the more expensive products or smaller boutique wineries that have limited production for their wines. People will start to understand that grocery stores mean cheap and cheerful and LRS stores mean quality. Since LRS’s can purchase whatever they want, VQA or not, that puts them at the advantage while the supermarkets gets ‘stuck’ with the value-priced VQA brands. BC wine’s image is suddenly less prestigious. (I am not considering the previous Liberal government’s wholesale pricing schemes in this argument – I am only interested in a public perception point of view here.)

Marketing aside, wine is now a lot more visible and maybe there are people who do not really need to see that. It is essentially forcing a lifestyle choice into the faces of a small part of the population that can do a large amount of damage. Suddenly, wine is absolutely unavoidable to anyone with alcohol issues that shops that these grocery stores. They now have to face temptation on their own or find a different place to shop.

I believe that BC wine is strong enough to compete without the excessively domineering marketing that I’ve seen in grocery stores so far. I also believe that it can do it without threatening the social health of our towns and cities. Consider that 7.35 to 20 percent of your Facebook friends potentially have a problem with alcohol in some way. How might huge wine displays right behind the check-out aisles effect them? Just like alcohol is healthy in moderation, asking questions about our community is healthy for a democratic society. Let’s question this kind of thing.

Cheers from wine country.

~Luke

Peller’s talk included a lot of family history and thoughts on where the industry is today. The family history aspect of his presentation was quite moving and many in the audience appeared to have not been aware of John’s grandfather’s, Andrew Peller’s, personal involvement in the genesis of BC’s wine industry. (Of course, there will be a book coming out that will include some of that history, and more, next summer. *ahem*) The most poignant information for me was insights about Andrew Peller’s character and personality, something that is not easy to obtain through the text of a book, even his own autobiography. Andrew Peller wanted only to be able to have and support a family. After all of the companies that he had created (some successful, some not) the most important thing was family and, as an immigrant coming from Hungary, his arrival in Canada was what allowed him to do that. The most important day in his life had nothing to do with business success but everything to do with his arrival in Canada. After a tumultuous journey by ship across the Atlantic, the sight of Halifax harbour was the happiest moment in his life.  This remained so throughout his life and in his will, he asked that his ashes be scattered in Halifax harbour.

John Peller’s father, Dr. Joseph Peller, had left his medical practice to take over the company through the late 1960s and into the 1990s. John took over in the early 1990s and has guided the company through to the present. Taking over in the post-Free Trade years was not easy and I believe that John deserves a huge amount of credit for taking the company from André’s Wines / Baby Duck to Andrew Peller Ltd. / Gretzky & Sandhill brands.  His knowledge of the industry is profound, intense, and very personal. The actions of politicians, bureaucrats, and trade negotiators are on John’s mind as the Comeau case and NAFTA are poised to become two battles for the wine industry in the coming years.

For industry people, these events will make their day jobs either more or less difficult depending on the outcome. Some wineries, especially smaller ones, may not even notice while others might be driven out of business because of it. For most casual wine consumers in BC, nothing may appear to change at all. Customers in Ontario may one day be able to order their own case of BC wine directly from the winery’s website without any fear that they would be breaking the law. In BC’s wine country right now, the interprovincial trade issue has been a big part of conversation for many years.

According the Peller, the outcome of the Comeau case will not solve anything but will be the “match that lights the gasoline” poured on the fire of interprovincial trade. With the fuse ready to be lit, there is clearly going to be some turbulence in the Canadian wine industry in the coming years and it is all based around trade with other provinces or countries. This is how far the industry has come in the recent quarter-century. 25 years ago, the industry just wanted to be able to sell their wines to anyone at all!

What I think is the saddest part about the Comeau case is that it uses the Supreme Court to modify laws that should have been updated or rescinded altogether by our elected Members of Parliament. These people are the ones who are elected affect that kind of change, not the courts. In his talk, John Peller said that the government bureaucracy of today is very different than the way it was in the 1980s. He noted that 40 years ago, the federal bureaucracy used to be staffed by people who were not capable of getting jobs anywhere else and who simply did as they were told by the elected MPs. Peller contends that the same bureaucracy is now made up of much more educated, competent individuals. This new bureaucratic culture is much more powerful and almost calls the shots to the elected MPs instead of the other way around. Peller noted that the quality of those elected MPs has declined over the years and that this makes progress difficult. He cited Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s recent troubles with making changes to the tax system as a symptom. Morneau happens to be Liberal but Peller suggested that these changes would have been proposed regardless of the government’s political stripes because the main objectives in the changes originated from the bureaucracy, not Minister Morneau himself. In a recent meeting to discuss NAFTA, a Minister in the government admitted to Peller that he (the Minister) “didn’t really know anything about the wine industry at all”. That is worrying coming from a person ostensibly fighting for the survival of the wine industry in international trade agreements.

On the same evening as Peller’s talk at Okanagan College, a press release arrived in my inbox about a campaign to raise money for the wine industry to present as interveners in the Comeau case. They even have a GoFundMe page and a hashtag #CanadianWineForAll. While the $200k is certainly lofty, I am curious to see how many average consumers will make a donation to this particular cause. I, as a lowly industry grunt, wine writer and single parent, have no extra money at this time to donate. I would guess that donating blood to this campaign is not really necessary at this point.

But I certainly agree that interprovincial trade barriers are silly and need to be removed and I was happy to hear that the Supreme Court will be hearing the Comeau case. The group of BC wineries who will be interveners – Painted Rock, 50th Parallel, Noble Ridge, Liquidity, and Okanagan Crush Pad – are all similarly positioned in the BC wine world. None of them are the “Big 3” commercial wineries – Andrew Peller Ltd., Arterra Wines Canada, or Mark Anthony Wine Brands, all of whom have developed strategies to deal with interprovincial trade. (It was Andrew Peller who noticed that it was not illegal to bring grapes across provincial borders, which is why he set up wineries in places like Truro, Nova Scotia.) Nor are they the very small boutique wineries that plentifully dot the Okanagan Valley and make the Naramata Bench one of the highest density wine regions in the world. Sadly, the fractures between large and small wineries will likely continue.

As someone with a particularly broad vantage point from which to observe the nation’s wine industry, John Peller now has the potential to be highly influential in BC in a way that his company has arguably not been since the late 1970s, when Baby Duck lost top spot to Calona’s Schloss Laderheim in total domestic sales. After seeing the respectful handling of Sandhill (a Calona brand originally) and others, I have nothing but optimism for their recent winery acquisitions. My hope is that the company headquarters in Ontario will spend enough time reading the memos coming from their BC wineries. Perhaps this truly national company with someone who is knowledgeable about all wine-producing regions and wineries of all sizes across the country, will be able to lead by example. I, for one, will be watching intently to see what happens.

Cheers from wine country,

~Luke

*Major kudos need to be extended to Ian MacDonald of Liquidity Wines in Okanagan Falls for initiating the Wine Talk series with Okanagan College. I had not yet been able to attend one of these and am thrilled that there is a winery owner that understands how important academics is to the future of an industry. From what I can tell through my research on the history of the wine industry here, this has not always been the case. Higher education has not always been respected in BC compared to other places where I have lived. Perhaps the industry will be considering a more academic approach to solving its problems in the future…

So here it is folks, a working cover of THE BOOK that has occupied my life since 2014. I am in the editing stages of it now and this cover is really only a mockup for an upcoming catalogue but I thought I’d share it with you anyway.

The book will cover a lot of BC’s historical terroir, from the geological history, the earliest days of the provinces European history, a ‘college-experiment’ with prohibition, and the beginnings of the industry itself right through to recent events. The previous concise history of BC’s wine industry was Alex Nichol’s book  “Wine and Vines of British Columbia” in 1983. (Yes, the same Alex Nichol that later  started Nichol Vineyard in Naramata.) Clearly, there have been some changes to the industry since that time, including Free Trade, Farmgate wineries, the BCWI, and the first $50 bottle of table wine in BC (know which one that was?).

The timeline for publication is late summer / fall of 2018. I’ll be posting about its progress here of course so check back often for updates. There’s a lot of interesting people and events in our province’s wine history. This book will talk about as many of them as possible.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke

I noticed lately that there hasn’t been a whole lot of action on social media this summer regarding #bcwine. A quick scan of that hashtag on Twitter reveals that very few people are posting anything that involves scenery in any way, even from accounts that are normally filled with beautiful wine country views. This also includes my own twitter account as well as another for a winery that I manage.

Of course the reason is that we have been largely smoked out for most of the summer. It’s one thing to have clouds clog up the valley (which is something that happens in most winters, making it very dark all day – they don’t put that in the brochures) but it’s another thing when it is smoke from forest fires. Smoke is insidious that way. We can’t get away from it by driving up to higher elevations like we often can with clouds. It turns the sun and moon red. It also smells bad and takes away the natural aromas of the seasons.

For those of us in the industry, there could also be another odd by-product of the smoke: self-censorship.

In 2015 I posted photos of the Mt. Kobau fire near Oliver as it happened because it was interesting, so close at hand, and was part of life in wine country as I saw it. It was a controlled burn that the forestry people were doing because the conditions were perfect for it. It looked like a volcano for a couple of hours and it made some dramatic looking photos so I posted it somewhere.

I was soon sent messages by more than a few people in the industry telling me to stop because I was giving people the ‘wrong impression’ of what it was like and that it not helping to bring tourists to the valley. I was told that the media was blowing things out of proportion and that it was keeping visitors away.

That was all entirely possible. Tourism plummeted that year during the last part of the summer as people cancelled hotel bookings and changed their plans. Business was down for a lot of places and there were noticeably less people driving through the Okanagan at that time of year. The smoke from the fires (most of which was from a much larger fire across the border in the US) literally choked the valley for a few weeks that year.

The same happened this year except that the fires were nowhere near the south Okanagan and fires in the north near Peachland and Kelowna did not start until later in the summer and one is burning right now across the river from Cawston. Arguably, the smoke this year was less worse than it was in 2015 but it seemed to last a whole lot longer. By the end of August, I realized that I hadn’t seen a blue sky in weeks nor had I taken any photos at all. The landscape just wasn’t as pretty as I knew it to be and didn’t think it very interesting to document. The light was flat and diffused making everything bland, flat, and grey.

This is one reason why I chose not to document much of the scenery this summer but maybe I shouldn’t have self-censored so much. The point of documenting something is to be able to recall it properly later. The Okanagan that pretty valley with a big lake in the middle  all year long – there are some really dark days in the middle of the winter that are just depressing, but nobody visits here at that time for the same reasons as they do in the summer.

One of the major reasons that I started this blog in 2009 was to document the Okanagan’s wine industry year round, to go ‘beyond the guided tour’, and show what it was like to live, work, and be in the place that makes the wines that we love. If wine is tied so much to a place, why is it that most people only see the best facets of that place? The beautiful vineyard photos that start off every issue of Decanter show some pretty amazing places but they probably aren’t that amazing every single day of the year? Why do we sell-censor? What do we have to hide? The wines come from this place, warts and all, so why try to put such a squeaky-clean face on it all of the time? Truth is always more interesting and complex than a misleading image and if smoke is going to be part of the Okanagan’s reality in the future, perhaps due to the changing climate, then we can’t deny that. People still flock to Victoria, BC at all times of the year even though people are clearly aware of what they are in for when they go. It’s really not a place where sunshine is a forgone conclusion (although I’ve heard that this past summer was very good for sunshine).

As for me on this website, I will continue to tell it like it is. There is a lot to experience here and to miss out on it because of self-censorship is not constructive nor valuable in the long run.

Cheers from wine country!

~Luke