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[00:00:00] Carol Eugene Park: Hello, friendly alumni. Welcome back to From Here Forward, your favorite UBC Podcast Network podcast. I'm Carol and she's Jeevan, my new co host. [00:00:11] Jeevan Sangha: That's me. Now, today's going to be a little different. Carol and I are ringing in our last episode of the year with a celebratory glass of wine, or two, or three. Now, I'm not a super avid wine drinker, but I hear Carol is something of a connoisseur. [00:00:26] Carol Eugene Park: I am what the youths would call a millennial cliche. I love hashtag wine o'clock, hashtag wine down with wine. [00:00:35] Jeevan Sangha: Hashtag rosé all day, I'm guessing, too. [00:00:37] Carol Eugene Park: Oh, yeah. See, this is proof that Gen Zs are justified in their constant bullyment of millennials. I'm a wine millennial, if I were a mother, I'd be a wine mom, but I'm not. I'm simply a woman who loves routine, in the form of a Chianti or any other red blend. Speaking of wine, how's that wine tasting, Jeevan? [00:00:57] Jeevan Sangha: I have yet to be schooled. I'm looking to my millennial sister to teach me a little more. But it's tasting pretty good. It's light. It's doing what I need it to do on a Saturday afternoon. [00:01:09] Carol Eugene Park: Light, that's all you gotta say. Give me like a description. [00:01:12] Jeevan Sangha: Okay, I'm gonna say, I hear that wine drinkers love to talk about notes, right? [00:01:16] Carol Eugene Park: Hmm. [00:01:16] Jeevan Sangha: From the research from this episode, I'm hearing a lot about notes. So, I'm getting floral notes, I'm getting... Hmm, let me take another sip and see. I wish I had more vocabulary to describe this wine but it's lovely. It really is lovely. How about you, Carol? How's yours going? [00:01:34] Carol Eugene Park: Mmm...You know, there's a lot of blackberry, there's a little smokiness, there's a lot of depth. And personally, as I mentioned, I'm a Chianti girlie. But Syrah’s kind of it for me. Like, it's doing the thing. I mean this is my third glass. So, take that for what you will. [00:01:52] Jeevan Sangha: You started without me. Look at you, getting ahead of the game. [00:01:56] Carol Eugene Park: I think that's a great segue into the whole point of this episode. We're highlighting the wonderful ways UBC is working with local BC winemakers across the province. So, in today's episode we teamed up with our friends in the Alumni UBC ecosystem, including the Land and Food Systems faculty and the Alumni UBC Wine Club. [00:02:14] Jeevan Sangha: And much to my surprise, UBC is actually really into wine. In more ways than one. [00:02:18] Carol Eugene Park: Yeah, I mean, UBC has winemaking classes, world renowned research, a wine library, occasional events with industry experts, and so much more. So, in addition to talking about these beautiful Moon Curser wines that we're drinking, more on that later, we've included some expert voices from a recent panel on how UBC and BC winemakers are dealing with the ongoing climate crisis. All of which we're going to dive in in today's episode with some support from fellow UBC alumni and wine experts. [00:02:46] Jeevan Sangha: Now, for those of you who like Carol and I were in the dark about the club existing in the first place, Alumni UBC Wine Club is a free club for, you guessed it, UBC alumni to get exclusive access to wines from Okanagan wineries. Each quarter, the club partners with wineries in the region that are owned and operated by UBC alumni themselves, offering exclusive pricing and bundles that you can opt into with club membership. [00:03:11] Carol Eugene Park: With a strong emphasis on education, members have access to tons of information about the wines and the story of the UBC alumni who came to build careers in the industry. Things like tasting notes, industry insights, and so much more. [00:03:25] Jeevan Sangha: For this quarter, Alumni UBC partnered with Moon Cursor Vineyards, which is the reason Carol and I have the pleasure of drinking on the job today. [00:03:32] Carol Eugene Park: And before I gush over how much I love this red; I will run through some background info on this winery. Moon Curser Vineyards is a South Okanagan winery near Osoyoos. Here's my favourite bit. Chris and Bita Toll worked as a software engineer and accountant until they had seen enough and called it quits. So, they moved up to the BC's wine region and opened in 2004. Talk about absolute iconic behaviour. The winery's manager is an alum, Crystal Coverdale, and here's Crystal on the history of the winery's name and its accomplishments so far. [00:04:07] Crystal: It comes from the history of gold mining actually in Osoyoos. So, people would be trying to smuggle the gold across the border, but the moon was so bright and being in the valley that it would ruin their plans. So, they're actually called gold smugglers moon cursers. Many of our wines have won awards along the way, um, but in 2019 we were actually from WineAlign, the National Wine Awards, um, announced as the best performing small winery in Canada. [00:04:31] Jeevan Sangha: Like Carol and I, though mostly Carol, you might be wondering how someone enters this industry. For Crystal, it all began at UBC in wine class. [00:04:40] Crystal: Yeah. I took the intro to wine science class. You had to take a third um, year non commerce elective and so wine, of course. I was wanting to be in an industry that I was interested and passionate about and so, wine being one of those, I had got an internship at a winery in Australia and that kind of led me down that path. Went into liquor retail management for a number of years in Vancouver and then found my way up to Osoyoos and managing the Moon Cursor Vineyards. [00:05:07] Carol Eugene Park: So, what I'm learning is that I went wrong in my adulting journey by not knowing that UBC had fun science classes. Despite my love of red wines, I have zero knowledge about wines. I listen when I'm at a wine tasting, but, you know, once you have too many glasses of wine, everything is just in out, you know what I mean? So, here's Crystal's take on the Syrah 2021, which I am lovin. [00:05:31] Crystal: So, this is our Syrah 2021. You'll smell notes of violet, maybe black currant, black peppercorn. Goes very well with bison burgers or Peking duck. Most of our red wines age for up to 7 or 10 years, this Syrah 2021, um, we'd actually recommend that you can cellar it up to 2030. This Syrah will be in the red wine pack, so it'll also be with a Dolcetto 2022 and our Border Vines Bordeaux style blend 2021. And then we have [00:06:00] our Midnight Run three pack, which is our bigger, bolder reds from our portfolio. So it comes with our Malbec, our Contraband Syrah, and also our Dead of Night, all from the 2021 vintage. [00:06:11] Jeevan Sangha: Now, I know I said I'm not much of a wine drinker, but if I am going to partake, I will partake in a white, like I am today. So, here's what you can expect from the white wine pack. [00:06:19] Crystal: And then we will have our white pack, the Arneis 2022, the Roussin Marcin 2022, and The Heist 2022, which is a rosé wine. The Roussin Marcin 2022 definitely pairs super well with turkey. If you wanted to go with a red, the Dolcetto would also be a lovely option. [00:06:36] Carol Eugene Park: Cheers to that. So, if you're a wine lover like me, or a mid like Jeevan, sign up for the UBC Wine Club and order these exclusive Moon Curser wine packs by December 10th. And you know, with the holiday season approaching, this is your chance to support local BC businesses and UBC alumni. [00:06:53] Jeevan Sangha: Moving along, they teamed up with UBCO and UBC's Land and Food Systems faculty hosting an event about climate resilience and BC wineries. The event taught me a lot about the challenges facing the wine industry today. And it's no surprise that like almost every industry in the world, the climate crisis is impacting how wine is made too. At the event, BC winemakers and UBC wine researchers gathered to discuss the specific climate related issues and how they're responding to them in the industry today. [00:07:19] Carol Eugene Park: So, here's Rhys Pender, the moderator, owner, and winemaker at Little Farm Winery in Cawston. [00:07:26] Rhys Pender: Farming is really hard right now. Not just in wine, in everything, and you know, make no mistake that wine production is farming, right? It starts with the grapes, and you know, we've been on a really rapid rise as a wine industry. You know, it's only been going a little over 30 years, really, this kind of modern industry that we have, and we've done amazing things in that time, incredible growth in acreage, in number of wineries, and most importantly, in, in quality of wine that everyone is producing here. [00:07:52] So, in that time, we've gone pretty much from kind of nothing to, you know, to something of a really, really great success. But, you know, we've seen this unprecedented list of challenges that we've had to face. So, and these are challenges I think we've never seen before, challenges you can't predict, challenges you can't be ready for. And having to kind of adapt and learn what to do about them. I love all these new terms we've had to learn. Heat dome. What the hell is a heat dome? An atmospheric river. What? What is this stuff, right? Smoke taint, COVID, a few years ago we've seen heat in January that was like, my vineyard went to 18 degrees Celsius in January. [00:08:28] Last year, December, we had some vineyards going down to like minus 30 something and obviously seeing the result of that decimating the crop this year. We've seen pests, we've seen birds, we've seen animals, we've seen diseases of the vines thrown off their normal schedule and doing strange, unpredictable things that we're not and can't be ready for. [00:08:45] Wildfires, landslides, flood, drought. A few years ago, in my winery we had a lovely week, I think it was late June, in between when the winery was on evacuation alert for flood, before it was on evacuation alert for fire. It was a beautiful week, yeah. So, you know, these are the things we've just seen in the last few years here. [00:09:04] But, you know, farmers are resilient. It's not the first challenges we've faced in the industry here. They're resilient, they adapt, and they have before, and they will again. [00:09:13] Carol Eugene Park: So, some of these climate related issues on wineries is not really a full surprise, but what Craig Pringle, manager of Haywire Winery in Summerland, experienced had my jaws on the floor. Here's that. [00:09:25] Craig Pringle: I've been here for five years, and what I've seen in five years is an incredible amount of challenges that face the industry. I live in Peachland, and almost every year since I've been here, I've seen the fires, you know, coming over the hills, and we have these cold winters the past two years in a row, and the heat dome and so on. [00:09:45] And then out of nowhere this year we had grasshoppers, right? And, you know, it sounds silly in comparison to what we deal with, but, you know, we've heard stories about birds and smoke and fires, but because it was such a hot, warm, dry May this year, all the grasshoppers hatched. And at first, everybody says, oh, they're grasshoppers, they're not interested in vineyards. Right? And so, we all said, oh, that's great, we have so many other things to be worrying about. And then the grasshoppers started eating the rootstocks and the bark and they, and then, and then the grasshoppers got big enough that the birds started to notice them. And so, then the birds come in and start eating the grasshoppers, then look and start eating the grapes. [00:10:30] Jeevan Sangha: We know extreme wildfires in BC will only continue, as per our interview with UBC researcher Dr. Laurie Daniels in October. We also know wineries will face the brunt of it with harvesting and wine production. But what do we know about the impact’s wildfire smoke might have on the taste of wine? Here's UBC chemist Wesley Sandberg with more. [00:10:48] Wesley Sandberg: Australia has really pioneered this work with their Brush fires in 2003, I think, and onwards, they've had severe brush fires, and sometimes agriculture burns. So, the barley and oat stubble gets burned, and that smoke blows into vineyards. So, they've pioneered this research, and I sort of piggybacked on that many years later. [00:11:11] But one big difference, of course, is the fuel source is different. When we have fires here, it's ponderosa pine forest, it's not barley stubble. And so, I think what we're starting to learn is that we're looking for different things in smoke exposed grapes. There's a regional-ness to this phenomenon that we have to take into account by using local grapes, local fuel sources, and that's what my research has tried to do. [00:11:38] But as a chemist, this is really what my job is. I try to predict what a wine will taste like by analyzing the fruit. Um, that's not simple, but that's what I think grape growers and wineries need to know if it's a smoky year, right? [00:11:56] Rhys Pender: Yeah, it's interesting that, because you know, I get to judge a lot of wines and will sometimes sit down over a week and judge five, six hundred local wines, and it's amazing how few actually show smoke taint, right? There are some for sure, but it's not a lot. And then, you know, this, the concept of sort of smoke impact to me is a bit more like, you know, oak, right? [00:12:14] There's a lot of wines that are over oaked for me, I'd say they're oak tainted. Right? And it's, uh, could be the same kind of thing, right? But, so, a little bit can be good, too much can be, uh, negative, right? And so, it's interesting, like, how, so, how are you guys working with the, you know, with the wineries in terms of your, your kind of research? Are you relying on a lot of field data and things like that to kind of get on the ground stuff here, because it's very regional? [00:12:37] Wesley Sandberg: The wineries in the valley have been very gracious to me, um, in giving me access and my students access to grapes. And this is not easy work, and its actually risky work, because the vineyards have to trust us not to burn the whole place down. And, in very bad forest fire years, and they have to rely on us to be careful enough not to expose all the rest of their crop. More recently now, I've started to work with a few people on the mitigation side so, this is where my research is moving. [00:13:10] Jeevan Sangha: Also, fun fact, some grapes wear sunscreen to protect themselves from the smoke. Here's Chair of UBC's Wine Research Centre, Simone Castellarin, with more. [00:13:18] Simone Castellarin: Kaolin, uh, now zeolite, other type of clays helps the reflection of the radiation of the sun and keeps the canopy cooler. And has been used, um, well, in different places in the world and, uh, it seems it works for a couple of degrees, like those are actually other strategies we are trying. [00:13:38] Wesley Sandberg: One interesting overlap is that some of these products that we can put on grapes that are supposed to, um, help with heat stress. They also coat the grapes, and they actually may block smoke from getting in. Or they might not block smoke from getting in but make the grapes more washable. So, it's easy to spray them off on a conveyor belt as they go into the winery. [00:14:04] Um, so this is a big area of work for me. I think the solution to the smoke problem is prevention. If you have smoke in the winery, it's maybe a bit too late already, so let's block it in the vineyard. I forget who brought it up, but somebody mentioned you have one row of vines that produce smoky wines, and then right next door to it, the wines are fine. Uh, it's not tainted. Um, this is really astounding to me, because it's growing in the same environment. Why should it not be tainted? [00:14:33] Carol Eugene Park: I love that for them, but I still won't wear sunscreen. [00:14:36] Jeevan Sangha: You should definitely wear sunscreen. [00:14:38] Carol Eugene Park: I'm not saying I don't, I just won't yet. I'm only 27, okay, relax. [00:14:44] Jeevan Sangha: True, I'm holding out hope you'll come around in your own time. [00:14:46] Carol Eugene Park: I will, you know, all things that are good, come with time? Or something? Grass is always greener on the other side? I don't know. This is a really hard pivot, but Jeevan, did you know that UBC has a wine library? Because I surely did not. [00:14:58] Jeevan Sangha: No, not at all. I mean, in my undergrad, I heard rumblings about UBC having a wine tasting class, and a lot of people wanted to take it, but I think credit wise it just didn't work out. A wine library, though? I mean, that's next level. [00:15:09] Carol Eugene Park: That is the thing that will cure all undergrad sorrows. So, um, anyway, on the wine research library, here's Simone, more on that. [00:15:18] Simone Castellarin: So maybe you're not familiar with the project, but, uh, at UBC we have a wine library. It's a beautiful place where, uh, we have a collection of wine from all over the [00:15:30] world, but the BC industry has been very kind in donating a lot of their wines. Particularly, uh, I will say, um, 20 years ago when there was a big project. related to the, uh, um, well to understanding the potential of aging of these wines. Some of these wines that have been donated in the late 90s, early 2000s are still there because we still have few bottles and it's very interesting how these wines are still holding very well, they're still very good. [00:16:01] But, uh, beside that, connecting to the topic of today's, um, dialogue is, uh, we have some bottles from 1980s, and an interesting thing is the alcohol level was 12%. I'm not sure if it connects to the climate or it connects also to the viticultural strategies, but now our wines tend to have more alcohol because we have more sugars in our grapes, we can ripen our grapes more. And it's interesting to see, I mean, this is almost a curiosity how, just by reading the label, you can see also an evolution of the industry over the years. [00:16:36] But the overall increase in alcohol level in wines is being observed across the world, related to changes in strategies, but also to this, uh, increasing sugars we have in the summers due to the warmer temperatures. [00:16:51] Carol Eugene Park: One thing you should know about Alumni UBC is that we, they, it loves to collaborate with different organizations. [00:16:58] Rhys Pender: How can UBC through new programs or research help our wine industry? [00:17:02] Simone Castellarin: You mentioned, we mentioned collaboration, we have had collaborations for many years with wineries and conducting research. We are funded in several of our projects by the industry. Um, but we are also trying to develop a more robust program that is around wine and grapes and that includes educational offerings, and we have courses at UBC that are focused on grapes or wine. We don't have a [00:17:30] viticulture program like other big universities close to large regions might have but we have been working at least assessing, uh, what we can do more to offer more education, um, resources to the industry. Because it's actually, I feel a need also in this region and, uh, the know how is obviously an important component for our industry. [00:17:57] Jeevan Sangha: Okay. The more you learn. [00:17:58] Carol Eugene Park: You know, every day my brain grows an inch larger. [00:18:02] Jeevan Sangha: Yeah. [00:18:03] Carol Eugene Park: Hmm. [00:18:03] Jeevan Sangha: That feels right. But I think the gist is that we learned a lot today. [00:18:07] Carol Eugene Park: That I did, that we all did. Let's have another glass, shall we? [00:18:10] Jeevan Sangha: Now that we've made some progress on these, let's do another check in. How's the red tasting, Carol? Is it up to your professional standards? [00:18:16] Carol Eugene Park: You know, there is this like, beautiful peppery darker flavor of the Syrah and I feel like it's making me feel like I'm walking down the streets of like Paris, you know, that was a terrible accent, but you know what I mean. [00:18:28] Jeevan Sangha: What about you? Carol in Paris, love that. I have to say this white is really doing it for me. It's really fresh, it's really light, I feel like it's bringing summer vibes into the holiday season, which is exactly what we need right now. Keeps me going and helps combat my seasonal affective disorder So, I would definitely recommend it. [00:18:46] Carol Eugene Park: Okay, but like, what city do you think you are in when you're drinking your white? [00:18:50] Jeevan Sangha: That is such a good question. I'm getting Florence, Italy vibes right now. Like, I feel like I'm on a patio somewhere. [00:19:00] Carol Eugene Park: Look at us, tourism through wine. So anyway, if you would like to try out these wines, these red and whites from Moon Curser, be sure to check out our show notes to sign up for the Alumni UBC Wine Club. [00:19:11] Jeevan Sangha: And the next time we're going to see everyone is in 2024. I mean, Carol, how are you feeling? [00:19:15] Carol Eugene Park: I don't know how to feel about that actually. [00:19:17] Jeevan Sangha: You don't have to panic yet about anything. Do you know what I mean? [00:19:21] Carol Eugene Park: No, because I'm panicking right now. But I think I personally will be getting more of these wines in 2024. [00:19:28] Jeevan Sangha: I'm catching your drift and I mean, you know, I'm new to the wine world. This has been a lovely inauguration into the wine world. I mean, you know, it's like a great gift too for the holiday season now that I'm thinking about it, and it's support local businesses. Like, you can't really lose. [00:19:42] Carol Eugene Park: Thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you catch our next episode by subscribing or following our show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling the feels like I am currently, please drop us a review. You can find me on Twitter @CaroleugenePark. [00:19:57] Jeevan Sangha: And me, you can find me on Twitter @JeevanKsenga. From here forward is an Alumni UBC podcast produced by Podium Podcast Company.