A TASTE OF MOROCCO
Pair braised pork with a rich red wine
The first time I met Howard Soon he was working in Port Moody at the old Calona Wines facility back in the early 1980s.
As the longest active winemaker in the country — with 37 vintages under his belt — the affable master winemaker will retire early next week to spend more time with his wife Wendy and his family.
Soon’s departure on July 24 leaves parent company Peller Estates and Soon’s beloved Sandhill Wines with both a terrific legacy and a huge hole to fill in the Okanagan wine community. I’ve never met a winemaker more at ease with the public and more able to talk wine at their level than Soon.
Soon was born in Vancouver in 1952, the grandson of a shopkeeper who emigrated from southern China in the 1880s. After earning a degree in biochemistry from the University of B.C., he worked in the brewing industry before he connected with Calona in 1980 as a quality control supervisor. He was an assistant winemaker in 1981 before going on to head up the winemaking team as the master winemaker, where he thrived.
B.C. wine has undergone a cataclysmic change since then, and Howard has never been far from the revolution. I remember tasting some simple, but wellmade, wines under the historic Calona Artist Series labels in the early 1990s. It was one of his $9 Rieslings that first convinced me that there was going to be a bright future for B.C. wine.
Perhaps Soon’s greatest love was Sandhill. He always championed the growers who supplied his grapes long before anyone else. He was also quick to identify that the place or origin of his fruit was as important, if not more so, than any single grape variety.
Soon’s commitment to vineyards led to the launch of Sandhill Wines in 1997. Back then, it was both a remarkable and risky wine strategy because it was a wine brand without a winery. Every Sandhill label was tagged with the name of a single vineyard on the front label and the story of the site on the back label, but there was no winery you could visit or see. With Howard telling the story, it was an immediate success.
Perhaps Soon’s greatest achievement was his work with the highly acclaimed Phantom Creek Vineyard and its Syrah grapes. Phantom Creek was the