Browse Area

• Broadway
• Burnaby
• Cambie
• Coal Harbour
• Commercial
• Downtown
• East Vancouver
• Fairview
• Gastown
• Granville Island
• Kerrisdale
• Kingsway
• Kitsilano
• Langley
• Main Street
• North Vancouver
• Point Grey
• Richmond
• Shaughnessy
• South Granville
• South Vancouver
• Surrey
• West End
• West Vancouver
• White Rock
• Yaletown

Browse Cuisine

Advertisement

Chef’s Table Wine Pairing, Kingfisher Resort and Spa, Comox Valley

by hans peter meyer

Serendity. A lovely thing.

I was pretty happy when I heard that the sixth (and final of the 2008-2009 series) of wine pairing events at the Kingfisher dining room in the Comox Valley was going to fall on my daughter’s birthday. What a great thing to share with the eldest of my kids, the one who (so far) is most into the experience of food and wine!

I’ve been taking these in for several years and it’s always a treat. I’m what my father calls a “feinschmecker” – what my friends sometimes call a “food & wine snob.” But, as a friend once said, “I’m not picky; I just know what I like.”

Well, sometimes I don’t know what I like because I haven’t tasted it yet. Wine pairing events are those places where I get to try new things. I don’t always like them (a couple of last night’s wines weren’t ones that I’d run out and buy – and that may be because I don’t appreciate them fully, another something I’ve learned by drinking deeply from life’s well: that I have things to learn about, and sometimes the learning happens over many years, numerous exposures and experiments with the same situations and flavours).

Wine pairing events have also given me the opportunity to sit down with folks I don’t know (we’re usually sharing large tables with other wine & food geeks or w&f-geek-wanna-be’s) to talk about… food and wine and what tastes great (and what doesn’t, though that doesn’t happen much in my experience; these really are excellent – and cost effective – ways to exercise and season the palate).

Pheasant agnolotti with beurre noisette and fresh sage.

Back to last night, the June 4th Wine Pairing at the Kingfisher dining room. Serendipity. A birthday. Great food. Good company at the table. My daughter looking great and thoroughly enjoying herself. Some amazing taste/texture/beverage combinations. My faves? Absolute top combo was the pheasant agnolotti in burned butter (yes, burned intentionally, and to great effect) paired with an amazing Sumac Ridge, Black Sage Vineyard Meritage (white, 2007). As our wine guide advised us, this blend with it’s 20% semillon was “grassy and herbaceous.” With the agnolotti, there was what one person at our table called a “rustic” flavour. Not sure I’d call it “rustic,” but I think I know what she meant: a little earthy, almost deliciously dirty. My daughter thought the wine was the best of of the bunch. I found the combo so enchanting that I’m going to use it in my next dinner party.

Kudos to Chef Troy and his team in the kitchen, to dining room manager Bill Ransom, and to all the staff at the Kingfisher. A wonderful evening, with lots of applause (at the end of a particularly successful course, or at the announcement of an especially tantalizing sounding wine), in a beautiful setting.

The 2009-2010 series of Chef’s Table wine pairing events kicks off on October 8, 2009, featuring five Vancouver Island wineries.

For more information contact the Kingfisher Resort and Spa at 1-800-663-7929.

©hanspetermeyer.ca / 2009