Tag: VQA

  TIME Winery has had some changes over the past year.  The biggest is their new winery located in downtown Penticton, where you can taste and buy their wines, but as well enjoy some food at their restaurant.  Congratulations to Harry McWatters for opening his new winery and restaurant space.  Another new news item that is going to affect this…

BC VQA wines are released twice a year; once in the Fall and then in the Spring.  The Fall wines tend to show more white wines, as well as Pinot Noir, while the Spring event has more red wines.  This tasting I was able to taste many fine white wines as well as some surprising reds.  The Okanagan Valley is…

Creston, BC is probably not what you first think of when someone mentions a grape growing and wine-producing region in BC. But it is. And it has a long history of orchard fruit production.  I found this out on my recent trip to the interior.  I knew that the Baillie-Grohman Estate Winery is located in Creston, and I know they produce very good…

Do you know that the Okanagan Valley gets 2 hours more sunlight per day than Napa Valley during the July and August growing season and that the Okanagan is warmer and more arid than Napa?  We should be able to get great ripe fruit, but as well as the Okanagan being a desert climate, we also get cool evenings allowing…

If you are familiar with BC wines at all, you should know of Sandra Oldfield and the winery she helped start with her husband Kenn Oldfield and friends Barb and Bob Shaunessy, called Tinhorn Creek in Oliver in 1993 and first vintage in 1994. This year, 24 years later, life changed for Sandra and Kenn when Tinhorn Creek was sold…

If you have not heard of the International Cool Climate Chardonnay Celebration, held in the Niagara region in southern Ontario, it is something not to be missed.  The i4C+ Celebration started in the summer of 2009 with some Ontario wine makers celebrating their success at the 2009 Cellier Wine Awards in Montreal.  These wine makers believe in the renaissance of…

Finally, the sunny, warm weather is with us here in BC. Winter was dreadful, but now we can get out on the patio and enjoy some freshly vinified BC white wine. The 2016 harvest was very good in BC and produced wines with good flavour character and acidity. Recently I attended the Bloom BC VQA Spring Release Tasting and tasted…

I love to support our BC wineries.  I watched over the many years as the number of wineries has grown as well as the quality improved.  Wine critics from here as well as around the world, have tasted our wines, celebrated the quality, and told others.  Now you can find BC wines around the world, from Hong Kong to London….

Perhaps, before I answer this question, I should define what is a cutting edge wine?  In the past, it could have been the use of stainless steel tanks, when none were used before, or the use of cultured yeasts specifically bred to impart particular flavours and aromas in a wine.  But now, these things are mainstream.  What is new and…

Winemakers, just like butchers, bakers, and astrophysicists, have to go to school, in order to learn how things work, why they work that way, and best practices.  In Canada there are colleges that offer wine making training; one such place is Niagara College, located by Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario.  I was fortunate to visit the college to review one of their…