Museum delights Okanagan visitors
On a recent trip to France, we included a stop at what some travel writers have called a “vino lover’s amusement park.” Imagine our surprise when the Okanagan figured prominently twice during our visit.
La Cité du Vin is a museum in Bordeaux celebrating the history and culture of wine around the world. It opened last summer.
Bordeaux has been a centre of wine making since Roman times. In anticipation of the museum visit, we carried no illusions. We were here to celebrate wine around the world knowing that the scenic valley we call home is a tiny player in world wine production. (Globally, over 18-million acres of wine grapes are cultivated. In the Okanagan, the figure is less than 10,000 acres.)
The wine museum was seven years in the making at a cost of $100 million. It aims to be the world’s largest centre of wine; a Guggenheim for grape lovers. Even the architecture of the building itself goes beyond superlatives. Rising ten stories above a former riverside industrial zone, the aluminum façade symbolizes a slosh of wine poured into a glass.
Inside, the self-guided visit began by entering a large foyer with six screens projecting an eight minute flyover of 20 scenic wine growing regions in 17 countries titled “The Vineyards World Tour.” Imagine our delight when nine slides of vineyards from the Okanagan and Similkameen were projected. “Look, we matter,” we whispered under our breath. “We’re small, but they’ve acknowledged us!”
State-of-the-art does not begin to describe the visitor experience. It’s hip, it’s engaging, it uses modern media to the fullest to take visitors back in time six thousand years and into a crash course in modern wine appreciation via 3D, hologram-like projections, music and other interactive media. Language was never an issue.
Museum visitors are issued digital audio devices, comfortable non-contact headsets with a choice of eight languages. There are 20 exhibit modules in all, delightfully studying facets of wine and art, religion, health, architecture, and world trade, to name a few.
As a visitor, you are in control of the content you want to explore. Choose a wine region around the globe, click your controller, and growers from the region appear on screen to passionately talk about their terroir and personal principles of viticulture. There’s an extensive display on how aromas are associated with wine.
It’s an olfactory buffet, where you plunge your nose into a copper trumpet and sniff to appreciate various subtle aromas associated with wine descriptors, such as pencil shavings, dark chocolate, or pepper.
I spent 15 minutes in a comfy chair viewing a multidimensional quirky video with actors portraying Napoleon, Churchill, Voltaire, Julius Caesar and other characters all interacting together — praising each other’s historic conquests and toasting their wine choices. Odd, but entertaining.
My wife especially enjoyed “The Art of Living” hall. She sat at a large dining table for a tutorial on the history and tradition of wine serving. The other dinner guests were projections of wine experts and “foodies” telling stories as if seated at a dinner party, while the projection of food, utensils and wine glasses on the table surface kept changing in pace with the expert’s evolving conversation.
After almost three hours, we were weary and a tad thirsty. There was still more to see and do, but mid-afternoon fatigue had set in. A visit to La Cité concludes with a wine sample at the eighth floor tasting room overlooking the river Garonne and the city of Bordeaux. Hmm, what to choose? Every day the list includes 20 wines from around the planet. Imagine our surprise when amid offerings from Algeria, Romania, Austria, and a half-dozen from France there was a noteworthy Okanagan wine and lone Canadian on the day’s list: Black Hills Nota Bene 2014.
This prompted an opportunity to namedrop. We mentioned to the server that we grow Merlot grapes for Laughing Stock Vineyards in Naramata.
She readily replied, “Ah, yes, we served your Portfolio 2013 last month. C'est magnifique!” What a way to top off our visit. Truth be told, for thirteen harvests we have been Laughing Stock’s smallest grower, with a modest single acre of Merlot. We departed La Cité du Vin feeling that our small contribution of one Okanagan acre amid 18-million globally has not been too insignificant after all. On the net: www.laciteduvin.com Craig Henderson is a Naramata resident who is active with Peach City Radio.