Aaron Moore is making coffee for me. Or more accurately, he’s preparing pour-over versions of three coffees from different parts of the world to teach me how to appreciate the brew. At Craft 42, a café and roastery in a Kelowna strip mall that Moore co-owns with his spouse and business partner, Taylor MacInnis, I’m here for a coffee tasting experience.
While I love travelling to the Okanagan, British Columbia’s major wine-producing region, I’ve lost the ability to tolerate more than a few sips of alcohol, making wine tasting about as fun as a headache. But I’ve found that even if you don’t drink wine, the Okanagan has plenty of delicious things to taste.
To cultivate your coffee consciousness, book a guided tasting at Craft 42. Chief coffee geek Moore will guide you through the tasting, during which you might choose different varieties of coffee prepared as either a pour-over or espresso to compare their flavours and roasting styles. Alternatively, you can select a single type of coffee and see how it changes when it’s prepared different ways. You’ll sniff and you’ll sip, as Moore shares notes about where he sourced the beans, how they’re roasted, and how you can improve the coffee that you brew at home.
Although the Okanagan is known for its grapes, other fruits are finding their way into alcohol-free drinks. Karma and Kuku Gill have been managing orchards on their land just outside Kelowna for several decades. In 2019, the family’s next generation, including their son Avi Gill and his wife and business partner, Binny Boparai-Gill, co-founded Farming Karma, named for the family patriarch, to produce sparkling sodas from local farm-grown fruits.
You can sample their creations at the Farming Karma tasting bar, starting with their original apple, cherry, pear, and peach sodas, which are refreshing and not too sweet as they are made without added sugar. The family has since launched the Hyrd8 line of fruit-based hydration drinks and expanded into a collection of non-alcoholic canned mocktails such as Mellow Mimosas, Conscious Cosmos, and Musing Mojitos. Now, that’s good karma.
If you crave the taste of wine but don’t want the alcohol, you can also visit one of the Okanagan wineries that have begun producing no- or low-alcohol wines.
Michal Mosny and his wife, Martina, emigrated from Slovakia to Canada, where they started making wine, calling their new venture Winemaker’s Cut. More recently, they’ve drawn on their Slovakian heritage to develop a line of non-alcoholic drinks and low-alcohol wines, which you can sample in their tasting room, The Opera Room, at the District Wine Village in Oliver.
Michal explains that Slovakia has a tradition of non-alcoholic fruit drinks, though they’re typically very sweet. At The Opera Room, they produce what he calls “botanical drinks”: alcohol-free, wine-inspired beverages crafted from fruit juice, a variety of herbs, and local sparkling water. The Piquette Blanc is made from muscat grapes and flavoured with elderflower, the Piquette Rosé blends merlot grapes with elderberries, and the Piquette Apple, like a sparkling cider, is made from Okanagan Gala apples.
The Opera Room also makes “dealcoholized wines”: wines from which most of the alcohol has been removed. The resulting products, which it markets as Incognito Blanc and Incognito Rosé, contain 0.6 per cent alcohol.
In Penticton, Evolve Sparkling House has recently developed dealcoholized and low-alcohol sparkling wines that you can sample in its pretty-in-pink hilltop tasting room. This specialist bubbly producer is making Evolve Dealcoholized Sparkles from 100 per cent Okanagan Valley gewürztraminer, which has only 0.24 per cent alcohol. Crafted from a blend of Okanagan chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, Evolve Light Sparkles measures seven per cent alcohol—about half the alcohol in an average wine. The winery is offering a tasting dubbed Lighten Up, during which you can try the Dealcoholized Sparkles and Light Sparkles along with Evolve’s traditional 12 per cent alcohol sparkling wine.
Tastings in the Okanagan aren’t only about drinks. Restaurants at several of the Okanagan’s wineries offer multicourse tasting menus that let you sample the region’s bounty. One of the more unusual dining experiences is available at Manzil, the window-lined restaurant with a spacious terrace overlooking the vineyards at Kismet Estate Winery in Oliver. Here, the tasting menus take you on a delicious journey across India, with B.C. ingredients.
You might begin your meal with crispy cod pakoras or dahi puri, a yogurt-topped potato snack, and continue with steamed mussels paired with masala-spiced fries, sablefish with a Goa-style curry, or a rich and flavourful butter chicken, all served with warm naan. There are sweets, too, such as a traditional rice pudding or a warm chai-infused semolina cake. The views of the grapevines are a bonus.
At Lakehouse Kitchens Cooking School in downtown Kelowna, you can whip up your own tastings with one of its beginner-friendly cooking classes. Although the home store previously associated with the school has closed, chef Travis Pye and his team of chef-instructors are still cooking in the upstairs kitchen space. They offer a full calendar of hands-on workshops, where you might learn to make your own ramen, master classic French dishes such as coq au vin or crème brûlée, get comfortable with west coast seafood, or craft a series of Mexican street foods.
In the Ramen 101 class, for example, you’ll get an introduction to preparing a tonkotsu broth, the creamy pork stock that forms the basis of many bowls of ramen. You’ll work on your knife skills, learn to make a perfect ramen egg, and try your hand at filling, shaping, and pleating gyoza, the fried dumplings that might accompany your soup. After all your hard work, naturally, you’ll taste the results.
And with all these delicious alternatives, from coffee to sparkling drinks to creative cuisine, who needs wine alone?
Read more food and drink stories.
