The real cheese

A week full of writing about real estate in British Columbia's interior, primarily for the Western Investor, comes to an end. It's been quite a run, book-ended by a cheese tasting Monday night at Les Amis du Fromage and publication this morning of work I did for the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine.

Cheese tasting

This past weekend was one for going slow, and I made sure a couple of good dinners were part of the mix. Among the menu items were a couple of cheeses from Oyama Sausage Co. on Granville Island and a bottle of Pinot Grigio from D’Asolo Vineyards. Despite suffering ongoing sensory deprivation thanks to last week’s congestion, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the various items.

Vacherin Fribourgeois was a raw cow’s milk cheese with an earthy edge. Congestion limited my experience to its more pungent traits, but the texture was what really captured me. Smooth and creamy, the cheese would pair well with sweet apples and pears. That being said, it was adequately matched but not equalled by the Isabella d’Asolo 2003 I’d uncorked, which was a better fit with the milder Brebis Basque. This hard ewe’s milk cheese from France’s Ossau-Iraty region has a smooth texture and salty-sweet nuttiness that’s quite winsome. Yet the best match for the wine was a pork roast I made on Sunday. The fresh fruit flavours of the wine cushioned the savoury meat (which I garnished during roasting with cloves and fresh sage) wonderfully.

Now it’s to work on a handful of stories for my editor over at Western Investor. The current issue of the paper includes my story on the booming Fort St. John region in northern British Columbia, which I first covered for the Fredericton Daily Gleaner in July 1998 as part of a two-month’s peregrination around Western Canada. The past eight years have seen the place explode with activity. But then, we’re all busy in British Columbia these days (or so it seems).

Cavafy rediscovered

My thoughts recently went back to C.P. Cavafy, a poet whose sense of history I’ve long appreciated. For me, Cavafy’s writing has a timeless quality, thanks to a simple style and often ancient setting that removes us from ourselves to focus us on something more important. His familiar riff on Homer, “Ithaka," is just one example. I could cite others.

Some of my latest reading on Cavafy includes Joseph Epstein’s article in The New Criterion, which describes Cavafy as having an abundance of the tragic sense – the sense that all created things pass away. Cavafy loves what the world has to offer but he also reminds us that the world is always in transition, that something more to reckon with exists than simply what is. The point seems too often lost in a world caught up in its own business. For me, Cavafy encourages us to see that which lies beyond ourselves.

Alas, I am dealing with what is this week: A host of stories with an end-of-week deadline, and a double-headed congestion mixing allergies with cold. Pass the Kleenex. Or, maybe not.

With heart

The latest issue of Northwest Palate is out! The issue profiles a few ‘favorite things’ and includes my account of a heart from one of my brother’s steers we roasted up one night last year and served to friends from Seattle. (Tip: Slice roast heart as thin as possible for a more delicate dining experience.)

The Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival last week was as pleasant an experience as ever, though I could have done with a bit more time to enjoy it. Alas, there’s always next year! Still, I came away with favourable impressions of a handful of wines on show in both seminars and the tasting room. I liked what I tasted from Grès St. Paul, as well as Domaines Ott’s Coeur de Grain (a rosé). Then there were the red wines black as ink from Uruguay’s Pisano winery ... in a word, striking. Retail stock brought to the festival reportedly sold out the first night, but I was fortunate enough to score tastes of an old vines Tannat and a fortified release kept in reserve under the rep's table.