Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Ok It’s damn hot…yada yada yada….38 degrees and so on….you’ve heard this every day now from me….I’m sounding like a broken record.

One thing that I haven’t mentioned is that, with the exception of the Shuswaps boat trip, I’ve been sleeping 8 hours/ night. That’s unheard of. My normal sleep requirement is only 6 hours.

After pretty much doing nothing all morning, I decided to head to Naramata after lunch. I visited a winery there called Elephant Island last year. This place is an orchard winery, which means that they do not make wine from grapes- they use other fruits. Last year I bought a bottle of apricot dessert wine and a bottle of Black Currant table wine. Amazing. Had to go back this year.

The Naramata bench is on the east side of Lake Okanagan just northeast of Penticton. Going through Penticton always reminds me of going to hockey school there as a kid. A woman would come around every day with fresh peach pies. Man those were good.

So Naramata has a ton of wineries and orchards. It’s actually a low sloping bench with great sun exposure overlooking the lake. I could spend an entire holiday visited just Naramata. Today, however, I went back to Elephant Island. The woman there remembered me from last year! This was the first visit where I was remembered. She was like “weren’t you here a year ago all soaked and riding a bike?  You’re the guy from Saskatchewan, right?”

I ended up getting a dry Pear table  wine for starters. I can’t really say that there was anything unique about it, but it’s just cool to have a pear wine…it would go really well with a goat cheese I think. I also got a raspberry dessert wine. All I can say about this is…wow. Such intense flavour. Had to have a bottle. I’ll be saving this for a special occasion.

After Elephant Island I visited Soaring Eagle. This is a new winery that is owned by a group of families that actually owns about 5 wineries in Naramata. I was impressed with their facility but less impressed with the wine. Of course, it was so hot out that it was hard to give a proper tasting to the wine. I ended up with a bottle of blush merlot. It’s a good ‘sipping on the deck’ kind of wine.

The last winery I went to today was Red Rooster. The wines here were much more impressive than Soaring Eagle. I tasted about 8 wines and ended up purchasing two bottles: a nice Reisling and their Meritage.

I headed back to Kelowna after the visit and went back to the Creekside Pub for the cheap Prawn night. Love that seafood…