Enjoy Wine, Food, and Travel with Karl MyWinePal
For the past few years, I have been covering the BC harvest by interviewing winemakers and finding out how the weather affected this year, what they may be doing new, and other tidbits of information. But I had not interviewed Ontario winemakers, to find out about their harvest, until today. I used basically the same questions to the BC and…
2018 Chinese New Year is arriving on February 16, 2018. That is the 4715th Chinese year. The zodiac sign of 2018 is the Dog. According to the Chinese Horoscope calendar, 2018 is the Male Earth Dog year. Brown is connected to the earth. Therefore, 2018 is also called the Year of the Brown Dog. According to chinesefortunecalendar.com “According to the…
This past year I tasted a tremendous number of wines from around the world, but some wines really resonated with me. It may have been the great balance of fruit, sugar, acidity for a white wine, or the fruit, tannins and minerality in a red wine, or something else. Something that made the wine stand above the other wines. Could…
Does it bother you when you are visiting a winery in another province, enjoy their wines, and ask them to ship you a case back to your home, and they can’t? Provincial politics gets in the way and prevents the free flow of our wine between our borders. Sometimes it is easier to get wines from other parts of the…
Cool climate areas are prime areas for making elegant sparkling wines. Champagne is a cool region in France, and is well-known for their sparkling wines, for example. In Canada our sparkling wine industry has been booming in my opinion. As I am in BC, I see a great growth in sparkling wine production, and I have seen sparkling wines from…
Where is Prince Edward County? Is it somewhere on Prince Edward Island? No, it’s in Ontario, between Toronto and Kingston, along Lake Ontario. I would classify it as a peninsula, but it is not long and thin, rather it is more circular in shape. And it’s a very cool climate area in Ontario; cooler than the Niagara region. It’s so…
While attending the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration (i4C) I tasted a small lot Chardonnay, 2015 vintage, by Thirty Bench Wine Makers from the Beamsville Bench in Ontario. That wine stood out among the other Chardonnays that I had tasted at i4C. So once the i4C was over, and I had some time to visit a few wineries, I made…
After spending a weekend tasting Chardonnay wines at the i4C Celebration in Niagara-on-the-Lake, it was time for me to visit some wineries in the Niagara region on my own, and try other grape varieties as well. I visited two wineries on the Beamsville Bench. My first stop was Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery. It is on a small rise and has…
As promised I have enclosed my tasting notes for the wines I sampled at the three International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars. Many of these Chardonnay come from Ontario, but there are also wines from BC, California, Chile, France and more. My notes are not as detailed as notes I make from my structured tastings at home, but should give…
Don’t we all love sparkling wine, whether it is high end champagne, or cremants, cavas and more? At the third of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration seminars, we learned more about how dosage affects sparkling wines aromas, flavours, and balance. This was a bit more technical in details compared to the other earlier seminars, but well worth it. Sparkling…
Video Guide Uncorks the Story of British Columbia Wines. Buy Now.
