Wine group on the road

Over the course of living in Saskatoon, we have become part of a great group of friends who take pleasure in wine tasting. That’s a fancy way of saying a group of us gets together a few times a year to enjoy wine, usually with food, sometimes on someone’s patio and sometimes in a favourite wine store in Saskatoon. We open a few bottles, then a few more, and the laughs begin to flow. Over the pandemic, we turned our group virtual for a spell and those zoom wine tasting nights felt like nights out and kept us going until things returned to normal. In those zoom wine tastings, we talked a lot about wine travel and as a group have now attended the international wine festival in Vancouver on two occasions including last year.

For this most recent wine trip, my wife and I headed to Vancouver a day before our group activities started for a bit of “us” time. On a cold, rainy night, we tucked into the cozy Chickadee Room cocktail bar for a couple of happy hour drinks and the free gluten free fried chicken that comes along with your order. This was a great first stop – excellent cocktails, tender juicy chicken all in a retro vibes bar that warmed us up.

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When a plan comes together

Through the pandemic a group of our friends started a zoom-hosted wine club where one of us would pick two wines, a few recipes that would pair well, and then we’d get together to eat and drink and stare at the little electronic rectangles of our respective likenesses on our screens as we caught up and laughed. Laughed a lot. During a few of those get togethers, we chatted (as one is apt to do) about doing a real-life wine tasting trip when it was safe to do so again. Fast forward to this May when those wine-soaked plans turned real and landed us in Vancouver to attend the Vancouver International Wine Festival.

My wife and I built a fun and relaxed Vancouver itinerary around the large wine tasting we we all going to. For me, any trip to Vancouver needs to start with a hike around Stanley Park.

Stanley Park in Vancouver
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Travel memories through wine

I like to consider myself a fairly advanced travel planner, but sometimes you just need to tip your cap to serendipity. A week or two after booking my flight to Vancouver for a short winter vacation in February, I came to learn I’d be in the city at the same time as an international wine festival. Quickly scanning the festival schedule, I bought a ticket for a wine tasting event downtown. Three hours, a world’s worth of wines, and now, me.

Before the wine tasting kicked off and after polishing off a very large early dinner to fortify me, I went through the tasting program to find the wines I was most interested in trying. In that process I realized I was going to be taking a trip down taste memory lane from many of my past travels. Wine moreso than food or other drinks can bring my mind right back to a specific place and time.

Like a lot of other attendees, I circled one wine in particular – the Laurent-Perrier Grand Siecle Champagne. Since coming back from France last spring and a magnificent trip to Reims, I have been more opportunistic in trying champagnes. Pushing close to $200 a bottle, there was a lineup for this wine most of the night. Anytime there was a break in the crowd I popped in for a sample. It was delicious on the first, second, third, fourth and I won’t say how many more tastings.

Vancouver International Wine Festival

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