Yesterday, the first (annual, we hope) VinoCamp Vancouver. I covered several of the sessions, found a Riesling I actually really enjoy (which is unusual for me), and became a hardcore Riedel glass convert.
Here’s some of the great shots from participants yesterday.

Image source: Megan Cole. You can see more of the images from the day here.

Kelly and Annie write Full Bodied. Annie has a great wine rack. So does Kelly.

See? Great Wine Rack.
Annie and Kelly write Full Bodied. They talk about wine, and, well, wine. Check them out. They also blogged VinoCamp. It’s all so very good.

France.
If you want to look at organic wine, you have to look at France, where it started.  A gazillion years ago.
The one thing to understand about organic wine is that there are 100s of wines you’ll never see on an “organic” shelf in the liquor store. They, much like several of the organic vegetable growers, can’t certify organic. It’s ridiculously expensive to get official organic standards.
There’s also a lot of “green” packaging in the world, but that doesn’t make wine “green” or “organic”.
Take a look at the videos by Gregory Finch. He’s talking about organic wine, better …read more

Wine is the message. The glass is the messenger.
The senses are the first things that help you taste wine. Your eyes let you take everything in, and then your sense of touch. You feel a smooth round stem with Riedel.
There’s some controversy over stemless glasses, but have you noticed, that when you knock over a stemless glass, it weebles, wobbles and yet, it stands back up, thus “saving the wine, which is important”.

The Riesling glasses are designed to deliver the wine to a different place in your palate. The “everyday wine glass” is built for durability, …read more

Micelle Bouffard and Michaela Morris, the sommeliers from House Wine (Michaela is french and calls is ‘ouse wine) are going to talk about food and wine pairings and are going to discuss guidelines. (image source, House Wine)

(wow, that Prospect Winery Riesling is amazing!)
House Wine offers a variety of wine related services, from private and corporate tastings and team building seminars to restaurant wine list consultation and staff training.
First rule of thumb: drink what you like. That’s what Gary Vaynerchuk says too. (crap = we weren’t supposed to drink the Riesling! oops)
Think about the weight of the dish. If you’re …read more

Township 7 has provided our “late morning wine” this morning. A lovely semillion, a rose and a private label red.
Brad Cooper, the winemaker for Township 7 (one of my favourite BC wine brands), is talking about how you can have the wine experience at home. If you add sugar to grapes and leave it for a while, you’ll get wine. It might not be good wine, but it’ll be wine.
Wine started out as a communal effort and continues as such today. The problem is, many of the wine we drink today is “factory” wine. Grapes go in, wine comes out, …read more

Wow. It’s 10:35 am. The first bottles of wine have been cracked. This really is the first time that I’ve set an alarm and gotten up at 8 am to drink wine.
Kathy Malone, a winemaker, who works at Artisan Wine Co, is talking about the BC wine growing regions, calling geography is a flavour. (image source: Mission Hill Winery)

Terroir. That “somewhereness” – that special combination of topography, soil, climate and people captures in wines of singular character and personality. It’s thought that it takes 40-50 years for the vines to express the minerality in the soil. The BC …read more

Dr. Hennie JJ van Vuuren has been with UBC for almost 10 years. There are 29 researchers from Canada Bordeaux, Germany, South Africa and Switzerland.
in the last 10 years there have been 11 million dollars in grants. Dr van Vuuren studies the genetic construction of wine yeasts, and has genetically engineers malolactic wine yeast (no bioamines, which van Vuuren claims is what gives you the severe wine headaches) and a urea degrading yeast strains, (no ethyl carbamate)
The UBC Wine Library has thousands of bottles of wine. They obtained 24 bottles of the same wine and open one each year …read more

This is definitely not the wine festival!
Vancouver’s first VinoCamp is bringing wine, people and tech together in one place, making wine accessible, educational and ideally, fun.
I’ll be live blogging the entire conference – everything from the BC Wine region through to Indian food and wine pairing cooking class. We’re looking at sustainable and organic wine making, wine blogging, and “the glass as a messenger” from Riedel.
We’re getting started in about 10-15 minutes, and I’ve got Gus, his partner Russ, Dario and Amanda and two people I don’t know at my table. :)  This is definitely half geek …read more