CANADIANS IN NAPA: EPISODE #5 When you’ve spent 44 years of your life in the northern reaches of Alberta, Canada on construction sites, oil rigs and pipeline corridors, no one should really be surprised when you decide to pack it in for the bucolic expanses of Napa Valley. And if you also spent those years…
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Culmina Family Estate Winery: The Triggs of the Trade
I don’t think it would be a stretch to describe Culmina’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Sara Triggs as a tour de force. Like Gordon Fitzpatrick who you met in my last post – Sara is a second-generation winemaker, and like Gordon, a descendant of Canadian winemaking royalty. Sara’s parents are Don and Elaine Triggs (see…
Second Generation Winemaking Families: Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards Sparkle
Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Angelina Jolie, Rashida Jones…….Sara Triggs? Gordon Fitzpatrick? What do they have in common? Some serious star power and a lot of familial fame. In the next two posts, you’ll meet the sons and daughters of industry legends who have stepped out of their parent’s shadows to carry on a family tradition….
Taste the Place: The Terroir Symposium & the Terroirnomics of Local
Terroir – muses Jay McInerney in his book, Bacchus and Me – is essentially the Burgundian inspired word for ‘dirt’ and dirt, he argues, is really just a proxy for ‘location, location, location’. Whether it’s the wine we drink or the food we grow – location and dirt are indeed at the root of all…
CheckMate: Anthony von Mandl’s Master Class in Terroir Curation
Checkmate Artisanal Winery: 4799 Wild Rose Street, Oliver, Okanagan Valley, BC CheckMate doesn’t boast a high-end, architecturally inspiring winery – yet. What it has, instead, is a chessboard of ten, site-specific, small-lot vineyards in the southern region of the Okanagan Valley that provide a fabulously distinct range of Chardonnay and Merlot fruit. If you are a…
Anthony von Mandl’s Kelowna Triple Threat: Mission Hill, Cedar Creek & Martin’s Lane Wineries
If you live inside (or outside) of Canada there’s a good chance you have limited experience with the full breadth of Canadian wine…and by limited I mean not much at all! Protectionist provincial politics, byzantine interprovincial shipping laws, and the generally glacial pace of change in industry regulations mean we have an utter dearth of…
Another Canadian in Napa! Meet James Harder of James Cole, Tank Garage and T-Vine Wineries
It’s fair to say James Harder captured a little of my patriotic, wine-loving heart when his Tank Garage Winery website and sentient IP geo-bot acknowledged our shared homeland. It’s a small thing, but that patriotic nod to his Canadian roots is just one of the many savvy insights that James and his partners bring to…
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