Top Drop event brings the best in terroir wines
It is now mere days until the next edition of Top Drop Vancouver, the terroir-focused wine event that a few industry colleagues and started up four years ago.
It’s all happening around Vancouver on Tuesday (May 23) with various communal winemaker dinners. Then the Main Event—our grand tasting, featuring all participating wineries along with a good handful of craft breweries and cideries—goes down at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre in Yaletown on Wednesday (May 24).
The Georgia Straight has once again stepped up as an event sponsor, so some big thanks goes out to this very publication. As always, Top Drop proceeds support the B.C. Hospitality Foundation, our local charity that offers financial support to members of the hospitality industry who might be facing major medical crises. A little peek behind the curtain: Each year, our process begins the same. Our team casts out a wide net to British Columbia–based importers and wineries, asking for winery applications to participate in the event. Once applications are in, they go to our selection committee, and our guidance to them is simple. First and foremost, Top Drop wineries must fit with our general philosophy: that wines, indeed, express terroir or offer a sense of place.
Whether we’re talking vines grown in mineral-rich soils or under coolclimate growing conditions bringing bright acidity or in sun-drenched regions offering generous, opulent fruit and so on, we want those elements to be notable in the glass and for them to have arrived there authentically, rather than via heavy-handed additions in the winery.
Sustainable farming is also key. Although we’re not militant on producers being officially certified organic or biodynamic (though many are), there is a high priority on those who employ these methods while farming their own fruit or who work with growers who fit the mould.
The other major component is a commitment to partner with producers who rarely visit Vancouver or have never been here before, so we can offer local wine enthusiasts a unique experience.
After many meetings with our selection committee, a few mild battles, and an arm wrestle or two, we came up with a roster of 33 international and local producers we’re extremely proud of. In fact, after the dust settled, I realized that a handful of them are wineries or regions I’ve written about right here over the past year or so.
The whole reason I do what I do for a living is to share my enthusiasm for awesome wine with those who may be pickin’ up what I’m layin’ down. It’s one thing to write or Tweet or Instagram about something and hope for the best, but all cards on the table: it’s a whole other thing when I can play a part in actually bringing these
see page 22