As the curator of my local history museum you wouldn’t believe how excited I was to discover that wine museums are real places. Well some of them are virtual but some are walk in museums that share with their visitors the history of viticulture, barrel making, wine racks and corkscrews. How wonderful is that? And [...]
Well who’d’ve thunk it? The first Thursday of the month in Kelowna is special. Why? Because BC Wine Museum and VQA Wine Shop hosts a free event where visitors can taste, learn about and purchase wine from a sponsored wine rack. Mind you, Kelowna may look close to Salmon Arm on a map of BC, [...]
Just recently, while checking out local wine racks, I noticed a lot of price reductions. Little orange tags tell me this wine or that one is $2 off. Actually, there are a lot of those orange tags, and I wondered ‘why right now?’ The answer is easy: new wines come out, liquor stores make room for [...]
What would be better than a glass of wine accompanied by chocolate? Possibly chocolates with wine inside? I’m not really sure: some days I would prefer one, the next day the other. I know for certain that from my most recent experiences with Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon that chocolates featuring these flavors [...]
Niagara Falls continues to provide scenic beauty for visitors from around the world. A romantic destination, Niagara also attracts wine lovers. Wineries in the location produce award winning products including ice wine, the kind of bottle to cause envy in your friends after a quick perusal of your fortunate wine rack. The long, thin bottles [...]
Well blow me down. I never knew that cream of tartar came from one of my favorite things. It would appear that this expensive substance used to give volume to egg whites when building Pavlova comes from the sediment produced in wine making. Grapes provide the only natural source for this substance which, when asked, many [...]
An ancient alcoholic beverage has been making its way across the world from its native Japan. Known by many as ‘rice wine’, sake apparently bears more resemblence to beer in terms of production. I won’t get too technical about how to make sake here, but Wikipedia writes that only the starch is taken from rice kernels, thoroughly milled, [...]
Call me naive, maybe even too strict. Anal might be the word if you must, but what is a swim-up bar and how safe would it be? Okay, that’s two questions. Too much spinning around in my head I guess, but this is a strange concept to me. I mean, add blazing hot temperatures to [...]
For an inexpensive wine from the Okanagan Valley, the OKV 2008 Select White makes a decent choice. Priced less than $10 Cdn on sale, even at a private liquor store (where cost usually ranges from a few pennies to a few dollars more per bottle, unless you encounter a sale) this makes good value [...]
Sometimes great art ends up in our wine racks. Not only do we sometimes see wineries commissioning art works to be presented for display as bottle labels, but also famous artists gain commissions too. Lucian Freud created a new painting for Chateau Mouton Rothschild last year, saying that his art accompanied a different kind of [...]
