Skip to main content

Right Side Up

Stan suggested we stop at Lake Okanagan because, while Canadian wineries are not on a par with those in Washington and Oregon, they have an impressive reputation for ice wines.  If conditions are right, that is to say, if the grapes are ripe late in the season, and if the weather is cold enough (about -8 degrees C.) the grapes are crushed while frozen, resulting in much of the water in the grape staying frozen, so that it can be removed.  What is left just might become a very sweet and flavored dessert wine. 

Stan is a wine expert, having rolled a pickup, partially loaded with wine, into a ditch.  There is very little Stan does not know about upside-down wine. 

Lake Okanagan is about a hundred miles long, two or three miles wide, and very deep.  It helps define a micro-climate, even that far north, where vineyards thrive along the sides of the Lake, in what is a kind of Sonoran desert.  Sonoran?  OK!  It is dry, for the Cascades.

Mission Hill Family Estate is, indeed, a family-owned winery.  In scale and investment, it suggested that corporate assets might have built it.  A greeter assured us that the winery was family-owned, and that it would stay that way because the couple had a six-year-old son.  I assured the greeter that the son would soon be into drugs, or his cups.  "Maybe," she replied. 

The property, with its vineyards diving down the hillside, appeared to go nearly to the Lake.  On the Lake side of the grounds, an elegant, outdoor restaurant made our lunch a grand treat.  I had Beach Angel clams on the half shell, sparkling with flower petals. 

We stayed at the Lake only two nights, not because the room was too expensive, but because we could not afford the day trips.  Oh, the burden of doing wine research!  
I took care, after the wines were packed and chilled, not to drive upside-down. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more