The Cabernet Sauvignon made the best match with dinner. The Barbera and Pinot Noir were the wines I most wanted to taste again.
A truly diverse lineup.
That distinction became the story of a recent dinner at Vancouver’s Blue Water Café, where a selection of Victorian wines gave us plenty to discuss beyond Australia’s reputation for big reds. There was Shiraz, certainly, and very good Shiraz. But some of the evening’s most persuasive bottles came from elsewhere in the state’s considerable repertoire.
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Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser.
The first thing we noticed at Domaine Faiveley wasn’t a vineyard, but a Rodin.
In the courtyard of the family’s Nuits-Saint-Georges headquarters stands an original cast of Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser, an unexpected sight at a Burgundy winery and an early clue that Faiveley sees wine as part of a larger cultural landscape.
The sculpture isn’t there simply for effect. Art has been intertwined with the family’s story for generations, and today it’s deliberately woven into the experience of visiting the winery.
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Drinking wine at the site it was made.
There are wine lessons you learn from books, wine classes and tasting notes, and then there are the ones you learn standing at a particular spot in Burgundy, looking out over the vineyards while someone explains that moving just a few metres can take you from one appellation to another, and from a wine you might find for under forty dollars to one that could cost hundreds.
Recently we were standing at a famous four-way crossroads in Puligny-Montrachet with Sarah Bird of Detours in France, our guide and translator of all things Burgundy. Sarah has a knack for taking something that can seem almost impossibly complicated—climats, Premier Crus, Grand Crus, soil and geology—and making it remarkably easy to understand.
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Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards recently celebrated 40 years.
For years, British Columbia’s sparkling-wine conversation was a fairly short one. If you wanted traditional-method bubbles, the list of established names was limited: Blue Mountain Vineyard and Cellars, Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards, Summerhill Pyramid winery and, increasingly, Township 7.
That list is getting longer. Sparkling wine is appearing in cellars better known for Chardonnay, Pinot Noir or Bordeaux varieties, while some of the province’s most distinctive examples are being made in quantities so small that finding a bottle can require a winery visit or the right wine-club membership.
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A view of the estate from above.
There are few wineries in British Columbia that have remained as steadfast to their original vision as Painted Rock Estate Winery.
We first visited the Skinners’ lakeside property overlooking Skaha Lake in 2020, when founder John Skinner spoke passionately about creating world-class Bordeaux-inspired wines from a single estate vineyard. Six years later, my return came for an entirely different reason—researching a story on helicopter wine tourism.
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