Summerhill Pyramid Winery-Kelowna, BC Canada Pt. 1

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike, let's start the adventure.

Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is; in today's episode. We head to the land of hockey, maple syrup, brutally cold winters. Butter Tarts, Duncker Roos, of course. Drake, Tim Hortons. Canada's most visited and largest organic winery, Summerhill Pyramid Winery, Stephen Cipes with a PH and the proprietor and founder of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia.

Ok, enough of the kidding around. Let's get down to the wonderful story of Summerhill Pyramid Winery. Stephen, your accomplishments would fill a New York City phone book. But let's start back at the beginning. Where did all of this being in connection with the Earth of the land and begin?  It goes back to my childhood. I love growing things and being in the soil and being outdoors and climbing trees a little. As a little boy, I've always been an outdoor kid and I, you know, got involved in real estate development in a way that would save the wetlands and the and the steep slopes and very involved in early in the 60s, 60s hippie, if you will, out there protesting the way people built things. I was one of the founders of why environmental rules are so strict today, why they can't just fill in wetlands and stuff like that was my original push in New York, which was a big suburb of Manhattan. Feel like I am part of the Earth, and I wanted to get closer and brought my little family of four little boys and my wife Wendy at the time. And we came up here and bought a little vineyard, and Kelowna had to take out almost all of the vines. There were grapevines that weren't really good for making wine. They were for table grapes and for hybrid grapes and things like that. And I went to France, bought some clones there that were making the finest sparkling wine in the world because I got an inspiration here that we had the ideal climate to make sparkling wine very exciting. You know, sparkling wine is made all over the world. But it's most famous, of course, in Champagne. Sparkling wine is the same thing as Champagne. It's just. Yeah, if it's not from Champagne, it can't be called Champagne.

That's correct. Especially if you make it in the traditional way, which is to use the three grapes that you must use in Champagne in order for it to be called Champagne, which is Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, in any given amount, you can even have a two percent Monet doesn't matter as long as you have all three here. We don't call it Champagne because we're not allowed to in a strictly enforce that. But we actually won the most prestigious award in the world in France, the best sparkling wine in the world. They couldn't believe it from a little place in an unknown wine region like Kelowna, British Columbia. Who would have thunk it? Those are the vines that you when you went to France. Yes. One of the biggest reasons is that if you have intensely flavored grapes, they will hold their flavor through the second fermentation in the bottle. And we here in the Okanagan have a very dry climate. It's called a semi-desert. And this low rainfall as we growers keep the irrigation down off really, and we get these intensely flavored grapes that make the best wine that will hold the flavor through the second fermentation in the bottle. And that's just been winning awards all over the world. In fact, when we first introduced our Sipes brewed in New York, where I'm from, I got rave reviews in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. And oh gosh, it was a hit, and it was all sold out here at home because we got such great notoriety in New York.

And the awards just keep coming. I understand you are home to the most awarded wine in Canada.

Yes, we also have an abundance of Riesling, and the reasoning here is extremely tasty and makes wonderful sparkling wine. And our biggest seller is the reasoning-based sparkling wine called Sipes Brewed, which does have Chardonnay in it as well. But it's the Riesling that is kind of has the high acid, which goes beautifully with almost any food, and it's made people roll their eyes and say it's delicious and they don't like sparkling wine, but they love Sipes fruit. And it's actually gotten a gold medal every year since 1992, making it the most awarded wine in Canada. In part two of our conversation with Stephen Sipes of Summerhill Pyramid Winery, we learn how the pyramid plays a part in the success of the aftermath.

It's time, boys, and girls for our Listener voicemail.

Hi, this is Brenda from Montana, and I want to know, so how long does wine last, if you like, put the cork back in it, stick at the friend. How long will it last if you do it that way? Anyway, thanks for your information. Bye. Good question, Brenda. Well, the experts seem to agree that. Go ahead, stick the cork back in the bottle. That's a great way to do it. Plus, it's economical to months would be about as far as you'd want to push it.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show, tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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