Hillside News

snpinktn a place to stay forever… Hillside winery is located on the Naramata Bench, in Penticton.  Our fruit is all grown on the Naramata Bench, vines planted on the traditional lands of the Syilx people, who named this area snpinktn which means “a place to stay forever” or “the place where people live year-round”.  This…

As we prepare for our favourite time of year—grape harvest, affectionately referred to as “crush” not for what it does to the crew and winemaker, but what we do to the grapes—we plan and strategize our use of fermentation vessels for each block of grapes. Because red and white wines are made very differently, we…

I recently travelled to Napa to attend the BC Wine Leader’s Forum. This is an event conceived ten years ago by UBC Okanagan, first through their School of Business and now through the Wine Research Center, as a means of connecting with the wine industry to assess how these groups can best work together. This…

Our July 2020 blog post gave an overview of what happens in the vineyard through the summer and how critical good vineyard management is.  “The quality of the fruit and the health of the vines are ensured through good canopy management. The canopy is made up of all the green growth which arises from the…

Through the summer of 2010, Hillside hosted a number of “terroir tastings” from barrels, illustrating the similarities and differences between four blocks of 2009 Merlot from the Naramata bench and one Oliver block.  The difference was obvious—almost a Sesame Street segment of “one of these things is not like the other” –the wine from Oliver…

The term intervention in winemaking spans a spectrum of practices. In theory, zero intervention would indicate that fruit is left on the vine and no wine is made. Maximum intervention would be…well let’s come back to that. The grapevine’s primary job, in fact its only desire, is to propagate. It wants to create the condition…

Oh my goodness, where do I start? Well, let’s start at the end. How do we know when it is time to stop aging a wine?  It’s a simple answer: when it is no longer improving or evolving in a positive way—ie it is “over the hill”.  The problem is our severe lack of time…

We faced harvest this year with no idea of what we might find. The “heat dome” in mid-June brought record temperatures at a highly unusual time for wine-growing regions. As this period is typically when we see “bloom” – flowering of these self-pollinating vines – I expected to see anomalies in both time of ripening…

Be kind, be calm, be safe, make wine… As we try to be patient, waiting for the grapes to ripen to perfection, we have been racking some of the 2019 red wines from barrels and blending. Pinot Noir, Gamay, Syrah and some of the Merlot need to be out of barrel and bottled to make…

Smoke and heat. Everyone wants to know how/if/how badly/how long they may affect the grapes and wine. The answer? So do we! Heat domes and wildfires in grape growing areas are new enough phenomena that we are learning so much year by year. The good news for us on the Naramata Bench is that we…