Laughing Stock in Ottawa

About a year ago we had the always charming David and Cynthia Enns from Laughing Stock Vineyards in BC out to Ottawa for a visit. We were pouring at a tasting of top Canadian wines being held atop the Foreign Affairs building on Sussex Drive, and I thought it was a great opportunity to have David and Cynthia tell Ottawa a little of what they're about and the hilarious story of how their winery came to be.

As this blog develops it will become obvious that I am in love with B.C. wines. We have several fantastic wine growing regions in Ontario but BC wines are something that we don't see nearly enough of in our market. So we're trying to do something about that at Lifford Wine Agency by importing some of what we think are the very best wines that the west coast has to offer. Laughing Stock definitely being one of them.

We have actually just released a very limited amount of Laughing Stock wines through Vintages this month, and if you hurry you can try out some of their wines. You can also regularly find their wines at great restaurants around town such as Domus Cafe, Brookstreet Hotel, The Shore Club, Restaurant Eighteen, Social, Town, Murray Street Kitchen, Absinthe Cafe, Farb's Kitchen & Wine Bar, and Johnny Farina.

You can learn more about their amazing wines at www.laughingstock.ca.

Laughing Stock Vineyards from Andrew Rastapkevicius on Vimeo.

Beautiful British Columbia

[caption id="attachment_24" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Chef Anna March"][/caption] Hosting wine dinners is one of my favorite things.  A couple months ago my good friend Anna March, the executive chef at Mariposa Farms, lined up a special dinner event for July 27th at The Urban Element in Ottawa. The theme of her dinner was seasonal British Columbia fare, and knowing how amazing our BC wine portfolio is she asked me to help with the pairings.  So over a Monday night tapas menu at Allium back in May we brainstormed our ultimate summer seasonal British Columbia menu.

For those who have never been to The Urban Element before, it is one of Ottawa's great contemporary design venues. Inside the former fire hall on Parkdale Ave, just north of Gladstone, owners Carley and Oliver Schelck have created a large industrial chic open concept kitchen and dining room perfect for cooking classes, special events and wine dinners. So for $135 per person Anna and I put together a six-course menu of her favorite foods from time spent living and cooking in BC paired with some of my favorite wines from the Okanagan Valley. I led a tutored tasting and Anna did an oyster shucking and risotto cooking demonstration for the 20 guests in attendance.  It was a fantastic night of communal dining at the harvest table with BC oysters, salmon, crab, quail and cod; and to pair with Anna's more delicate seasonal flavours we used the fresh and elegant wines of Blue Mountain Winery and Joie Farm.

Photographer extraordinaire Orion Zuyderhoff-Gray was also in attendance to document the evening. Most of the photos below were taken by Orion.  For more information on The Urban Element, Anna March and Mariposa Farm or Orion Zuyderhoff-Gray follow their links to their home pages. There is always fun food and wine things happening at the Urban Element. Keep an eye on their calendar for upcoming events. This is what our BC dinner looked like last week:

Debut

So what began as a university hobby - drinking - translated into the part time job of selling wine to local restaurants and hotels in the Kingston area. That initial intrigue ended in one of Queen's University's few student wine cellars and a tireless passion. Four years, lots of international travel, hundreds of thousands of car miles, and a lot of wine later, I represent Lifford Wine Agency's portfolio of fine wine in the Nation's capital.  We're Ontario's leading importer of private import wines, so I spend every day working with top restaurants all over Ottawa and Eastern Ontario, tasting wine, writing wine lists, educating service staff and planning events. Since my time in Ottawa I've noticed that, apart from a few notable exceptions, Ottawa doesn't really have any wine blogs...at least relative to the amount of all the great food blogs in the city. We have a vibrant foodie community with lots of great events, local producers and fantastic restaurants to write about, but unfortunately wine often gets only a passing mention. So my impetus behind starting Capital Wine is to spread the word of things happening in Ottawa's wine scene. Most wine events are attended by the same great repeat customers, but so many more people are interested but don't know where to look. This is aimed to be a resource to get linked into the Ottawa wine scene from an insiders perspective.

If you stick around I'll likely be posting about Ottawa area wine tastings, wine dinners, restaurants and wine lists, LCBO wine releases in Vintages and just my general musings on wine. Thanks for reading and feel free to get in touch! Twitter @AndrewRasta

[caption id="attachment_31" align="aligncenter" width="584" caption="Photo by Scott Adamson for Kingston Life Magazine"][/caption]