Sheryl Kirby

Food, Life and the World at Large

Category : wine

Canadian Wine In Your Cooking

Built in the late 80s, our building, while considered swank in its day, still boasts a shared laundry room. Inside the door of the laundry room is a small counter that serves as a makeshift swap shop. Got old books and magazines? Leave them there. Old dishes, baby clothes, or home decor items? Somebody wants them!

Greg returned from the laundry room this morning and handed me this little pamphlet, published in 1966 by the Canadian Wine Institute, which, as best I can tell, no longer exists.

Now, if you know anything about Canadian wine, you’ll know that it really wasn’t taken seriously until about a decade or so ago. Canadian wine, what little there was of it, was notoriously bad. More amusing is the fact that there are no wineries, regions or specific varietals mentioned at all. The recipes included call for things such as “Canadian sweet or cream sherry” or “Canadian dry white table wine”, never giving the reader a clue as to what they should be looking for when buying said Canadian wine. I’m also a little taken aback by the number of recipes calling for sherry, although that might be the flashbacks to the bottles of “Fine Old Canadian Sherry” my teenaged friends and I consumed on the wharves of the Halifax dockyards in the 80s.

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When is a Wine Like a Woman?

Everybody’s Mad Men crazy this week, and so are we, even when it comes to wine. It probably wasn’t intentional but this past Tuesday’s class at the iYellow Wine School had striking parallels to two of Mad Men’s leading ladies. With a focus on full-figured reds and graceful whites, it’s hard not to offer up comparisons to the characters of Joan and Betty.

Led by sommelier Taylor Thompson, enthusiastic wine students filled the lovely back patio at cafe Taste to try a variety of Ontario wines that were either graceful or full-figured.

The cool and graceful whites included a Trius Brut from Hillebrand Estates Winery, a chardonnay from Flatrock Cellars and a barrel fermented chardonnay from Henry of Pelham. Thompson explained the different processes used for the two chardonnays, explaining how the barrel fermentation created an oaky flavour with notes of honey and a creaminess in the second wine compared to the minerality and buttery flavour of the first.

Reds can be graceful too, though, and a pair of Pinot Noirs from Cave Spring Cellars and Lailey Vineyard Winery were the next to be sampled. The Cave Spring pinot noir was bright and full of strawberry notes, very light in colour whereas the Lailey pinot was darker, with a nose of over-ripe fruit, and an earthy acidity. But on Mad Men, graceful Betty is known for her cold demeanour and to my palate, pinot noir tends to leave me a bit cold as well.

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