The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast - Summerhill Pyramid Winery-Kelowna, BC Canada Pt. 4

Summerhill Pyramid Winery-Kelowna, BC Canada Pt. 4

09/06/20 • 6 min

1 Listener

Our featured winery is we conclude our interview with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia. As we've learned in past episodes from Stephen, it's all about making wine to its purest form, and that includes serving local and organic food in their restaurants. And what exactly does local and organic mean, and why is that so important?

It's the largest impact on global warming is the food production for the eight billion of us. This business of 30-mile-long, that's a death in the oceans. And the sprays that come over on the jet streams from Asia to North America and the amount of carbon footprint to move all these, you know, thousands of tons of food everywhere. It's got to stop. It's ruining the earth at an astounding rate. If we go back to local and organic, we're going to have a much bigger difference in our breathing the air and keeping the planet alive. One of the biggest things that impacted us is the tractor. By going up and down in the fields, all the topsoil disappeared, and now we have to put chemicals to top topsoil and these pesticides. Already, according to The New York Times, 90 percent of the insects on the planet are gone, including the bees and the butterflies. And these are our pollinators. You know, I can understand why people don't realize that every time they buy something that's not organic, they are contributing to pesticides that are killing our insect. And if we don't have our insects, we are in big trouble in our conversation.

Stephen, I could tell that you're very progressive in that you're continually moving forward and trying to perfect whatever process you're in the middle of. But in the upcoming years, what kind of goals do you have?

I would say my goal is to get other wineries to convert to organic and other food producers to convert to organic. And I've started a declaration which has a website, organic, Okanogan dot com, organic Okanogan dot com. And you can sign the declaration online. And it's even if you're from California or Brazil or wherever you're from. It shows that you know, we are anxious to be a model and make a model of being organic. So that would be my wish is that our properties with some real property are a model to the world of man and nature and the beautiful wines we produce and also then, you know, the healthy wines that we make. I see the correlation in France, the amount of cancer in children of people living near vineyards there, and their population is so much higher than ours. And I have the link on our website. It's pathetic to see all these children with their hair shaved off, and you see the coffins going down into the earth. Children, you know. For what? For chemical wine. It's ridiculous. I can't believe that one child's life, to me, is worth all the wine in the world.

The world is the way it is. And I'm sure I can't change it all in one and one day. But I'm going to try.

Well, that's good, because you're trying makes me try. And then collectively, we start to make an impact on this whole thing, start to improve the planet for everybody. All right. As we close it out, let's get all of your contact information, Stephen, and you can contact me, Steve. I'm the proprietor at 250. 764.8000 ext 199 or ext. 11. Our websites are, https://www.summerhill.bc.ca/I also have http://organicokanagan.com/ and http://alloneera.com

That's the precious one that I'm working on with my Book, All One Era, which you can get on Amazon.com. Twelve dollars and 21 cents. Wonderful. Bless your heart. Thank you for all you do. Thank you very well.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show, tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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The world is the way it is. And I'm sure I can't change it all in one and one day. But I'm going to try.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy

Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Summerhill Pyramid Winery-Kelowna, BC Canada Pt. 3

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass wine has a past. We look for adventures at wineries around the world. After all, grape minds think alike.

Our featured winery is we continue our conversation with Stephen Cipes, proprietor of Summerhill Pyramid Winery in British Columbia, Canada.

Well, we started out of our little garage making wine in 1990, 91, and we introduced the same Strutt in December 91 to right in the beginning in 92 in New York City to great reviews there, as I mentioned. So the official opening is 92, but we've been making wine since the late 80s. You know, we came here in 1986, my family and I from New York for 30 years now. We've just been dedicated to the amazing growing conditions here and the lovely people here. I have to say that British Columbia is a treat to be here. Such lovely, honest, and wonderful people are all around us at all times. Our crew, our employees like family. It's beautiful. A lot of people join Summerhill because they want to. I even get comments like Steve we'd work here for if you didn't pay us.

We love this place. There are so few things in this world that give us energy. Most things take energy. Yeah. So that's wonderful.

Something we learned in a previous episode was that Steven built a pyramid on the property to incorporate that pyramid into the winemaking process.

What I think it is, is sacred geometry is related to the electrical nature of life itself. And it brings out I would say it's not it does not make any liquid worse or better. It clarifies it. So if you put wine in there, for instance, that has flaws in it, it will bring out the flaws and make wine like cooking wine. You can't drink it. And if it has good qualities, it'll bring out good qualities—the same with milk or orange juice or any other liquid. And we've proven that time and time again in the last over 30 years now. And it's very conclusive, and we're very thrilled with the experiments and plan to go on bigger and better and more experiments to prove the value of sacred geometry on liquids. The size of our pyramid would be the exact size of the capstone on the Great Pyramid. Ironically, we didn't plan it that way, but it just happened to come out to be exactly what the size of the capstone on the pyramid would have been—sixty feet square and four stories high.

Well, You are one of the most visited wineries in Canada. I imagine that you've got quite a few employees every year. We have about 170 employees in the season, and that drops down to about half of that in the shoulder seasons. But of course, with COVID, we're running way below that because most of the weddings have been canceled, not allowed to have more than 50 people and they have to be six feet apart. And the Chinese tourists that we get every day, busloads of tourists from China are not coming. We're not getting any tourists from the United States. Even our own in Canada are coming much less frequently. So we're way down in and visits this year because of COVID. And yet, interestingly, our sales have gone up incredibly because of the Internet sales, the wonderful online sales have been fantastic. I think we had a fifteen hundred percent increase over the same months last year. So, yeah, people want to buy our wine. That's organic; it's the pyramid, this gold medal-winning, whatever. And they love the wine, so they don't come to see us anymore, whether it's ordering online and we deliver. And a portion of those employees that you just mentioned are working at the website. Your restaurant is just a wonderful restaurant. Very proud of that. We have a 200 seat organic restaurant and catering. We usually do over 100 weddings a year. So we do a lot of food. We at one time were called by the suppliers, the biggest outlet in all of Kelowna, which is huge. That means all the hotels and all of the big restaurants and everything. We were the biggest one, Summerhill, because we do a lot of volume and food, and we have a fabulous chef who's the chef that the chairman of the chef association and the teacher at the school. And everybody really admires him and respects him is a pillar in the community and we're very proud to have him. That's Jeremy. We have an application now into the city and the Agricultural Land Reserve to actually build a world think tank on food production. It's called the Culinary College for Humanity, and it will feature classes and certifications to show the industry and homeowners, of course, how to cook and grow and prepare. Meals that are organic and local versus chemical and far distance in part four of our interview with Steven Cipes of Summerhill Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, we talk about how to make the Earth a safer place for all of us and his future goals for the winery.

Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If yo...

Next Episode

Hidden Legend Winery - Victor, Montana Pt. 1

1 Recommendations

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is so basically I opened the Hidden Legend Winery for at Harvard Business School would call the worst possible reason to open a business, and that's because the neighbors thought it was a good idea.

In this episode, we head to the state that has the largest migratory bird in the nation, the only state with a triple divide allowing water to flow into the Pacific, Atlantic and Hudson Bay. We head to Victor, Montana. I'm Ken Shultz and I am the founder and winemaker at Hidden Legend Winery in Victor, Montana. Ok, Ken, let's go back to the beginning. Where did this spark come from? Well, when we were kids, I had an uncle that was a research chemist and a serious hobby winemaker, friends with the head of the technology department at Purdue and various vineyard owners. And things of that nature in his basement had all the right glassware. It was like Frankenstein's laboratory. So I guess that was the spark. Oh, yeah, that was early. You know, under 13, I turned 21. I was going to school in Lausanne, Switzerland. I worked overseas for a number of years and I came back. I got married when I was twenty three and the very first time I owned a closet I made. Me personally, I've lived all over Montana and I just love the big sky. But how about, you know, I was still in Ohio when I got married and we came out here, we got married in seventy five, came out to Montana, saw it, fell in love with the place in seventy six and finally moved here in seventy nine. Well my wife is Norwegian and she thought it looked like Norway and because I had worked there I thought it looked like northern Pakistan but no monkeys or water buffalo. There's something captivating about the Bitterroot Mountains.

You can look off in the distance and see a whole train. Well, you know, at some point when hiking and fishing and vistas and all of you know, the alluring things of Montana kind of settle down to a little bit.

I thought I'd make some wine and evidently I hadn't thought it through very well because there's no grapes. However, I had read The Hobbit and I knew what meat was. And so I came across a bucket of honey that somebody was just disposing of and I thought I'd make mead. I mentioned it to my peers in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and they were like, oh, my God, can no, don't make me. It's horrible. It's thick. Vikings drank it. You'll give winemakers a bad name. I thought, well, you snob's, I'll show you that I can make a mead every bit as complex as your wines. And so I made mead in the mid eighties. Let me just put it this way. I have a driveway that's a half a mile long, three switchbacks up a mountainside. And the guy that used to keep it clear for me in the wintertime would do it twice for a for a bottle.

Ok, let's rewind just a little bit without getting technical, but getting technical just to fill everybody in and be especially neat is often referred to as honey wine, but that's not really accurate. You make the wine with honey water and yeast rather than fruit. So technically meat is kind of in its own category of an alcoholic beverage.

Well, the word mead goes way back to the Sanskrit and the word Megu is honey in Sanskrit. And it's where the English word Medo comes from, which doesn't mean field of flowers. It means we're nectars gathered. And so Mead is actually a shortened meadow.

Well, I imagine that the chemical process is very similar. You're dealing with sugars, but just different kinds of sugars. So are there some nuances to the whole process?

The process is very similar, although we do have to create an environment for the yeast in honey because there's nothing in it but sugar and a grape contains just the right amount of nutrients and trace minerals and acids and sugars in it to make wine. And the powder on the outer outer skin is yeast. So if you break a grape, you can't stop it from making wine, whereas honey needs to be adjusted a bit before it'll ferment. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHYSM If you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe until next time pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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Support The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/thebestwinepodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.