Hey there, RobR, I'm quite curious about Okanagan wines, too, though from a greater distance (I'm in Tokyo). Any chance you could write about what you find during your explorations?

Lots of importers, liquor shops, supermarkets with wine, restaurants of all sorts that serve wine, sommeliers in cummerbund and consumers who drink anything from $3 Spanish with Korean BBQ on the riverbank to $10,000 bottles of Romanee Conti at the local branch of Taillevent. Over the past decade or two everyone's finally shifted to refrigerated containers for import, and tax duties have lowered considerably. Wine is still pricey here, though, and you have to pay careful attention to how bottles have been stored and otherwise handled if you want to buy better ones. The Internet has changed the marketplace here, too, though maybe not as much as in some places. And the small local liquor store is dying out, as well.

Locally produced wines from locally produced grapes is still a long ways off, though individual operations get hyped from time to time. I want to imagine that continued effort on their part will pay off over time, but there are lots of molds and fungi and rain here, as well as a much shallower wine history and culture. So when it comes to shelling out $100 or even $30 for a bottle, I buy French or Californian or Italian or Spanish or Australian or other New World (decent selections from Chile in recent years) before I even try to remember Japanese.

Sake is another story entirely, of course... ;-)

A few years back I made a stop in the Katsunuma wine country on my way home from running a half-marathon up in the Nagano mountains. Was somewhat surprised to see how proud one winery's proprietor was to show his use of firetruck hoses to pump very warm water into open-topped painted metal fermenting barrels that looked like oil drums on steroids. He'd imported 'concentrate' from both Algeria and Romania and was dumping it, yeast and the warm water into the drums and using a large egg-beater-like contraption to keep a vortex going. Then he covered the drumcan with a huge plastic tarp and fastened it with a monster rubber band and let it sit for awhile. A tasting of his end product held no surprises after I'd seen his production line.

Granted that was several years ago, and some people in that and other 'wine' producing areas have since studied viniculture in California and France and are currently trying their best. They still are decades away, it seems, and in my more cynical moments I imagine that Napa in the 19th century still had the jump on them.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, wineluv, about wine and sushi. There is no good match to my palate. Part of the problem is that 'sushi-meshi' (the rice portion that gives the dish its name) is prepared with vinegar. Another is that soy sauce is a bad match for any wine I've tried with it. Fortunately there are so many good sakes around, with liquor stores vying with each other these days to present ever-better lists of obscure local offerings. They go superlatively well with sushi.

I even have trouble with wine and Chinese, due largely to the aforementioned soy sauce issue. But they have Shaosing 'wine'... ;-)

So, HJ, I take it you're not recommending I start up a Japan wine page?! ;-)

Not to ruin my own credibility though.