Enjoy Wine, Food, and Travel with Karl MyWinePal
You may have noticed some of my recent Instagram posts showing wines, beer, cider, and spirits from JAK’s liquor stores. They provided me with these samples to show you what you could enjoy over the BC Day long weekend. It was nice to enjoy different beverages. Sometimes I do want something other than wine to drink. The hand-crafted cider and…
Did you know that during the ice age, glaciers up to 3 km thick covered the Okanagan and carved out the valley we love? The retreat of the glaciers left benches covered with fertile soil where many wineries grow their vines. Okanagan Falls, between Penticton and Oliver, I think holds a sweet spot for growing grapes and making wine. It has…
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…
Where is the Okanagan Falls Region? The Okanagan Falls region reaches from the shores of Skaha Lake to the tip of Vaseux Lake, north to south. It is sandwiched between Penticton, Summerland and Oliver, the Okanagan Falls area is famed for some of Canada’s top wine production with the highest quality wines in the valley. It is the narrowest part…
It has been a long voyage of discovery for me to find out what type of relationship Riesling grapes have with the soils of BC, or as some may say the terroir of the area. As mentioned in previous articles, it started with the idea, then contacting all BC wineries that produce a Riesling wine, to ask for a sample…
The hard part of the BC Riesling Review is done. I tasted through 35 wines over a period of 3 months. I can say that it has been a very interesting experience. Below are the notes. I tasted each wine two times. The first time was as soon as I poured the wine in my glass. The second time was…
With summer holidays and then the extended power outage due to the wind storm this past weekend, I have finally finished tasting through all the 2013-14 vintages of BC Riesling that I received from BC wineries. Thank you all. My next step is to enter all my tasting notes into a database. The database will be broken down by primary…
I am a lover of Riesling. It allows the wine maker to produce wine in many styles, from bone dry, to a lusciously sweet ice wine. While we here in BC have talked about making very good aromatic white wines, I have not yet seen a systematic analysis of our aromatic grapes, Riesling in particular, and how the wines differ…
04.16.2013. That’s the date that the Okanagan Falls Winery Association (OFWA) launched their Inaugural “The Heart of Wine Country Comes to Vancouver” event to show their wines to the wine trade, which includes wine writers like me, but as well wine shop and restaurant owners and staff. If you ask someone in Vancouver where is the Naramata Bench, they could…
