Enjoy Wine, Food, and Travel with Karl MyWinePal
New Australian wine has arrived on our shores after a hiatus, in part due to COVID. I attended a tasting of these new arrivals. Some are new to BC while other wines are new vintages of wines that we already enjoy. I missed out on a seminar, so have no additional pearls of wisdom for you, but here are my…
After visiting Cannon Estate Winery, my next Fraser Valley winery stop was at Singletree Winery, which is only a few minutes away. Thank you to Tourism Abbotsford for setting this meeting up for me. I met with Debbie Etsell from Singletree who poured me a selection of their wines, while I sat in one of their cabanas overlooking the vineyard….
It is not often that I have a chance to taste aged red Bordeaux wines. I purchased 5 wines in the past during the Bordeaux releases. Four wines are from the Right Bank of Bordeaux and one is from the Left Bank. The wines’ vintages are either 2005 or 2008, which makes the wines, 16 and 19 years old. I’ve…
BC Day is celebrated to honour the history, culture, and achievements of the Canadian province of British Columbia. It falls on the first Monday in August each year and is a statutory holiday in the province. This day commemorates the creation of the colony of British Columbia, which was formed on August 2, 1858. This was a significant event in…
Would you like to belong to an exclusive club able to enjoy top-quality wines with grapes sourced from Napa Valley wines and fermented and aged in Vancouver? Meet California Cult Classics. According to their website, “California Cult Classics is Canada’s first and only private member’s winery, operating in North Vancouver for the last 16 years. International wine critics have declared…
Summer is the time to enjoy BC seafood and BC wine together on your patio with your friends. That is exactly what I did with Township 7’s Provenance Series Rosé and Pinot Gris 2023. In general rosé and Pinot Gris wines tend to be fresh and best enjoyed upon opening, without decanting. For these tasting notes, that is just what…
One of the newer winemaking families in Chile is the Toro family located in the Maipo and the San Antonio Valley. They bought their first vineyard in 1998 and made their first wine in 2001 under the label Viña Chocalán. Chocalán is the indigenous word for the yellow blossoms from a shrub that blooms in the area. I received two…
Sunday, May 12, and Sunday, June 16, 2024, are Mother’s and Father’s Day respectively. Did you know that Mother’s Day has its origins in the United States, where it was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914, while the first Father’s Day was started by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd and was first…
Washington state has over 900 wineries. That is amazing. While our BC wineries are bound primarily to mountain valleys, Washington state has a large land area to the east of the Cascades mountain ranges, which is where many of Washington’s wineries are located. But how can you try wines from so many wineries more easily? One way is to attend…
The Robert Mondavi Winery is historic for putting California, and New World wines, on the international stage. I was fortunate to have a chance to interview Kurtis Ogasawara, Winemaker for Robert Mondavi during VanWineFest 2024. I was told, “Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, Kurtis lived just outside of wine country in the Bay Area. When he went off to college,…
