No whines for these wines
Grapes, no wrath: We move from sampling 700 sips to the Roaring Twenties — sprinkled with things literary
SIP AND SPIT: Your assignment: Sample 700 wines from 108 producers representing Italy’s 18 classified regions. In four hours. The Italian Trade Commission made that challenge in the Terminal City Club recently, starting with the Campania region’s Alois winemaking concern and ending with Zonin 1821 from Veneto. Truly ancient grapes contributed to the Casale del Giglio firm’s Lazio-region Cesanese that was enjoyed by House Wine co-founder Michaela Morris. Still ripening as slowly as in Caesar-era Rome, they had American porn star-turned-winemaker Savanna Samson expose them in her Sogno Ono (Dream One) brand.
As for dreams, former B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch head buyer David Scholefield noted the “international-standard homogenized wines” of his 20-year stint becoming “organic, fresh, juicy and with a wild quality that is very refreshing.”
Recently arrived from Egypt, Croatia and Kuwait postings, consul-general Massimiliano Iacchini revisited his Marche home region with a glass of Monte Schiavo’s Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi while others tackled the remaining 699 vintages.
• MAKING THE BEST OF IT: It’s easier to create palatable cuisine from superior ingredients. But what if they’re day-old bread, cauliflower stems, used coffee grounds, salmon fins, trimmed-meat “odds and ends” and so forth? No sweat for chef/ owner David Gunawan at the Dunsmuir- at- Hornby Royal Dinette, where his recent “Ugly Duckling” dinner will reprise Nov. 24 and may become a $79 fixture with beverage pairings. Born in Indonesia, where antiChinese sentiments forced his Wu family members to adopt other names, Gunawan relishes the globally growing no-waste practice of turning scraps and offcuts “into something beautiful.” His salmon belly in octopus consommé with bell pepper-trims compote is beauty, indeed.
• ROAR FAVOUR: One diagonal block from the Royal Dinette, the Hotel Georgia’s “Roaring Twenties” party promised “an unspoken air of seduction … glitz, glam and speakeasy allure.” Many female invitees wore flapper attire, chappies sported caps and fedoras — indoors, no less — and the Prohibition bar’s Brad Stanton and Robyn Gray dispensed a bathtub’s worth of free gin, rum and vodka cocktails that usually cost $15.
The theme echoed the hotel’s 1927 opening, when the Sun noted that future lieutenantgovernor Eric Hamber’s wife Aldyen “had chosen a lovely gown of adorable pink heavily studded with silver sequins.” Equally glittering this week, fashion designer Jason Matlo’s chef d’atelier Wen-chee Liu wore a one-off frock she’d made to the boss’s sketches. For those fancying something more substantially deluxe, the Georgia’s adjacent 48-floor tower’s still-available penthouse and two sub-penthouses would make downtown’s nighttime heart look sequined.
• DAY’S WORK: Quick: Name a B.C. author whose 46 books have sold three million copies in 160 languages but is little known here. Yes, it’s David Day, who launched his 45th, the scholarly and superbly illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded, in the Vancouver Central Library’s Alice MacKay room Wednesday. His decoding links Alice author Lewis Carroll’s fictional characters and scenarios to eminent real-life Victorians and their doings. Day’s 46th book, Tolkien: An Illustrated Atlas, will release next week in a printing of 60,000. His Tolkien Bestiary sold a million copies. His reissued Tolkien Dictionary found 100,000 buyers in 2014.
U Vic grad and former logger Day inherited toughness from dad Alan, 91, a former fire chief who still bench-presses more than his 165-pound weight. For literary impetus, young Day’s Metchosin surroundings were a military firing range, an ammunition factory and dump, a First Nation’s reserve, a prison and a former leper colony. Later influences included a continuing friendship with British authordirector-historian Terry Jones and the Monty Python’s Flying Circus troupe. Now he’s compiling and adding to a poetry anthology beginning with his 1975 first book, The Cowichan.
• READY TO WRITE: Granville Island Cultural Society executive director Barbara Chirinos merely observed when Vancouver Writers Fest artistic director Hal Wake launched the 28th running at the complex’s Performance Works. Next time, the former moviemaker and folk- festival operations manager may be a participant. She returned from hometown New York recently “inspired to write a historical novel with a truly fantasy element in it.” That’s better than coming back as a virtual basket case as she did in 2006 when a bus T-boned the car she was in.
• DOWN BUT NOT OUT: City fashion designer Chloe Angus and Haida artist Clarence Mills were readying to show their combined wares in New York when a non-malignant spinal tumour paralyzed her lower body on June 29. Twentyyear husband Gabe Eyers promptly became Angus’s caregiver-chauffeur, and some of her seven staffers took the trip. Their feedback will inform couture designs that incorporate Mills’ traditional first-nations motifs. Angus should be ready to exhibit at the 2016 NY Now show. Let’s hope that, as the song says, she makes it there.
• DOWN PARRYSCOPE: The foofaraw about removing Georgia and Dunsmuir streets’ “freeway era” viaducts seems to overlook that they replaced one the vastly smaller city felt it needed when it opened in 1915.