Wine tours: sip great wine, tour sights on the cheap
4/7/10
Picture perfect: Mission Hill winery, the largest by productin in West Kelowna, is a popular tourist and wedding destination Photo by Aidan Whiteley (The Phoenix)
Kelowna is kind of boring. Yet in a few months, it will be a booming tourist destination--people from across Canada and beyond will pour into the city to, well, hang out. To a student, the gloss of Kelowna is long gone. We've seen it at its greyest and coldest, and known it for a town where sometimes the most interesting thing going on is Perogie Night. So what do these tourists know that we don't?
Wine tours. We're bombarded by wine imagery here, whether it's shiny PR photos or rows and rows of bottles at the wine store. But on a student budget, we don't often buy wine when we could buy, say, Lucky Lager. Heck, a can of Guinness is almost high culture, when we can afford to lay our hands on one. But it gets a lot more interesting when you consider that once you have a spare day, if ever, you can spend that day cruising around from winery to winery, letting people give you free wine (or at least, very cheap wine). They might even teach you something in the process.
Kelowna Downtown Winery
You wouldn't know it driving by, but if you go down Richter until you get to the industrial district, there's a 6 acre winery just off downtown. Calona Wines is one of the province's oldest wineries, although it's now been joined in the building by premium label Sandhill and Lower Mainland brand Peller Estates. Although that doesn't necessarily jive with our concept of wineries as vast plots of land on the side of a hill, it's an interesting design because it's, well, downtown. Unlike many other wineries, you have a good shot at being able to walk there, depending on where you live.
The winery manages to operate without on-site fields by trucking them up from its Sandhill vinyard in the South Okanagan and by buying grapes from other B.C. farmers. This is actually not an uncommon practice--many of the larger wineries operate off-site vinyards, and many of the smaller vinyards that are popping up now have been selling off grapes for a while, before rule changes over the last 30 years loosened the requirements for starting a winery.
Walking into the winery, it felt like a gussied-up liquor store. Among other varieties . reds lined the walls and a fridge on the back wall chilled white wines,. The cashier, a woman in her early twenties wearing an olive shirt and a hat, motioned us up the staircase to the tasting room, where the real fun begins. Wineries often structure their tastings in many different ways. At Calona, you can pay either $2 or $4 for a series of wines they describe as a "flight"--ostensibly comparable wines grouped together by quality.
This is the point where you wade into the language of wine--and where someone who doesn't know it can begin to feel left out. Wines are grouped into two broad categories--red wines and white wines. Whites are lighter, better suited to drink on their own or with light snacks like sushi or fish. Reds are what the taster will tell you is "full-bodied"--they'll often be spicy, at times even savory. Not all reds are this way, but many reds are suited best for drinking with red meat like a steak because a chemical called a "tannin". Tannin comes from the grape's skin and helps to break down the meat's complex proteins, at the same time releasing flavour as the tannins break down, making the wine less heavy.
The staffer who guided us through the tasting was knowledgeable about the winery and helpful. Even though the structure of the cavernous tasting rooms, containging historical winery equipment and pictures on the wall, indicated the sort of Roman atmosphere that can surround a winery, her hippie aesthetic (along with the fact that our tasting was scored by Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name Of) lent a feel to it that made it interesting. "We're not like other wineries," she replied when we noted the music.
Without places to sit, I felt that the space was geared towards drinking the wine and then leaving, but not before taking a look at the store on the way out. Generally, however, this is probably a good place to start because it's not too far out of the way. Although the tasting's not free, it's cheap, and the staff are the sort of twenty-something retail folk that are easy to relate to. If you wanted to take home a bottle, they had a featured white sitting on the counter for $8; the cheapest we found during our journey.
Are You Ready To Wine Tour?
Most of the wineries in town aren't as easily reached as Calona, however. The best bet, if you're heading to the hills, to go check things out is to identify a cluster of wineries in an area and go wine-hopping. We picked Mt. Boucherie Estate Winery, Little Straw Vineyards, Quail's Gate Vineyards, and Mission Hill Family Estate. If you're cool with a hike, you can take transit (At Queensway, you can take the 21 to West Kelowna and then transfer onto the 20) out to Boucherie Road in West Kelowna and hit the first three. Mission Hill, a long climb up a hilly road, might be out of reach for this particular escapade.
The first winery that we went to on this jaunt is Mount Boucherie. It's jammed in behind another winery with a Coming Soon sticker on the front, as well as a tiny winery off to the side. Boucherie is not really visually impressive. For the longest time, they only sold grapes, but they started in on building their own winery, and the wine shop is really just a small, unadorned block of a building. Despite that, they had very knowledgeable staff--a volunteer named Peter was ready with stock anecdotes about their $5 flight of wines, or free if you buy a bottle of wine (which range from $14-25 depending on the variety of grape). Ice wine is much more expensive, because the grapes need to be frozen on the vine for 72 hours and harvested cold, with a lot of grapes generating not as much wine.
Wines are named for the type of grape used to make it. So beyond reds and whites, wines tend to be categorized by their name, which are usually very similar. Popular varieties of white wine include Riesling, Gewurtztraminer, and Chardonnay. Famous reds include Pinot Noir, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc. The biggest thing to look at is the sweetness scale. Various wineries will call it differently, but essentially, a 0 connotes a wine that is dry or not particularly sweet, while an ice wine, which is all kinds of sweet, will be around an 18. Reds tend to be 0s, while whites tend to be somewhere between 0 and 2. Sweeter wines will contain more flavours like peachy, apricot, and stonefruity flavours, whereas dryer whites will be sharper.
Almost across Boucherie Road from there is Little Straw. Little Straw was started by three brothers who operated a farm that grew some grapes for sale to other wineries, until it joined the rush of new startups in the late eighties. The winemaker described winemaking as something the three brothers had to do to survive, and largely an art that they taught themselves. Their building is new and although it's not big itself, it has a huge front room where the tastings take place. Their tastings are free, and their wines range from $16-$22. Upstairs, they'll have a lounge that will be ready to go for the summer where they plan to showcase local art and food, but they couldn't show it to us now.
For grapes, Little Straw has the larger varieties but it also has some rarer ones like the Marechal Foch. Less popular grapes can be interesting. They constitute a major risk for the winemaker, because if you want to grow a rarer grape, you need to start two to four years before you'd even get the wine. Smaller wineries like Little Straw have to be choosy about what they grow and how much, because when you only make so many cases, you have to split your stock between your own wine shop, local liquor stores, and wine outlets on the Lower Mainland. Overall, Little Straw has a pretty polished front end with a hardworking farmer mindset in the back end of it.
Down the road is Quail's Gate. The winery, started by the Stewart family and co-owned by provincial cabinet minister Ben Stewart, is built to take advantage of the vista, with huge windows across every side of one wall, giving a great view of the lake. Their wineshop is incredibly polished, with trained tasters that act more like bartenders than retail staff. I'd been there before, where a tasting floor manager walked me through wines on one of the worst days I'd had as a journalist, and eased my sorrows with wine and patter. But that was on a slow day.
It was at Quail's Gate where the issue of summer crowds raised their ugly head. We visited them on Good Friday, and the clamour of people pressed up against the winetasting bar reminded me of a busy Wednesday at the Well; the tasters had to split their attentions between three different groups, and various tourists pushing to the front to get their shot at some free wines. Quail's gate offers a complimentary flight of wines, but then also offers you the ability to purchase other types of flights from $3 to $8. Much nicer than the wine shop on a busy day is the restaurant, where you can actually chill out a bit, unlike many other wineries. It's kind of pricey, with $5-$9 appies and $10-$15 entrees. Largely, Quail's Gate isn't bad, but it's going to be busy.
Our worst experience of the trip came at, oddly enough, the biggest winery. Mission Hill is surrounded by a high, intimidating wall that made us feel like we were entering Jurassic Park. The path to the wine shop is meant to guide you through their courtyard and admire their architecture. The wineshop itself is filled with merchandise and constantly branded. Unlike every other winery, they refused to speak with us or offer us a tasting to review because we hadn't been pre-approved as a media source. Their selection ranged from decently affordable wines to incredibly high-end varieties. Their tastings were $5, but could be free if you bought two bottles of wine. Overall though, we got the feeling from Mission Hill that the student wine enthusiast wasn't really welcome--the set up of the shop and the looks we got from the staff made it seem like they preferred to serve the more middle-aged and moneyed tourist set.
Business in front, organic in the back
On the other side of the lake, wineries are a little bit more spread out, and so less geared towards the touring aspect. Summerhill Winery is located far into Kelowna's Lower Mission, and if you just start heading south on Pandosy, it turns into Lakeshore and eventually Chute Lake Road. On Kelowna Transit, if you take the 1 to Lakeshore and DeHart and transfer to the 16, you can take it to just outside of the winery.
Summerhill is known for its giant pyramid, where a lot of the fermentation process takes place. The decor in the wineshop is vaguely Victorian, rather than the marble style you see in most wine shops. Rather than flights, Summerhill offers tasters the choice to taste four wines for $5 dollars. Unlike most wineries, they allow you to drink ice wine with your tasting dollar, which is great because they are very very tasty and very very expensive.
As a beer drinker, I am very unclassy when I drink wine unless guided by a more knowledgeable observer. Luckily, most tasteries are willing to help you out, although only the downtown wineries went out of their way to suggest a correction to my technique. Basically, you need to grab a wine glass by the stem, because grabbing it by the glass warms it and changes the taste. Tilt the glass to look through it to see if you don't see too many bubbles, swirl it around the glass to air out the wine and let it breathe a bit. Stick your nose in the glass and sniff on what tasters will tell you are wine "aromas", before sipping it slightly. Just use the first sip to pretty much coat your mouth, and take the second sip to actually taste the wine.
Summerhill markets itself as one of the largest certified organic wineries in the Valley. When we visited Little Straw, the winemaker said that in his opinion, the difference between organic and, for example, their wines which are branded as natural, can sometimes be as little as to whether or not a winery uses stainless-steel posts to support the vines. At Summerhill, however, we got the feeling that they back up their marketing with an organic mindset. We were shown around Summerhill, where we saw employees collecting seeds from a tree for use as a salve, and nettle for use by the restaurant. We saw a traditional indigenous earth house built by employees for after-hours drum circles and "travelers."
Whatever, just drink wine
This is by no means an exhaustive list of wineries in the area. There are plenty more in the Kelowna area, Winfield, Summerland, and Naramata, if you want to take a little trip. The biggest thing is to just enjoy yourself. The whole point is just to have fun, and to find something new to do in Kelowna.
With file credit to Sean Rossouw and Aidan Whiteley
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