It's all about the dirt

With apologies to Road 13 Vineyards, the tag line winemaker Michael Bartier has used to explain the terroir he's working with in the Okanagan Valley came to mind during a trip yesterday to Ladner, just south of Vancouver.

Gazing across the freshly dug rows of potatoes being trialled by local growers, and the piles of some 85 varieties of the tubers those rows yielded, one couldn't help but consider local soils something special. It was a point made by some visitors from Real Potatoes Ltd. of Prince Edward Island, who dropped in to see how some of the varieties they'd supplied for the planting were faring on the West Coast. The soils of the Fraser River delta, they said, were different than the iron-rich soils of PEI, and the climate was different, too. (So much sun wasn't expected.)

I picked up Blazer, Romanze and two other varieties to test in the kitchen. Here's hoping growers found something worth planting. Most potato varieties are anonymous by the time they reach the consumer, but the efforts growers put into finding a variety that will pass muster with distributors make life easier for those of us on the other side of the counter.

The new view

To satisfy the handful of folks who stop by and see the posts here, a brief update is in order: This year has been a busy one, with a number of projects on the go, both professional and personal. Most recently, the home office moved from a wooded enclave in South Granville with its abundance of bird life to a more urban location overlooking the junction of Main Street and Kingsway. It's right on the flyway to the largest crow roost in B.C., however, so there's still wildlife to be seen -- and some spectacular city- and skyscapes, too, as the snapshot above shows.

Writing projects this year have been steady. My weekly reports for Business in Vancouver (Tuesdays) and Wines and Vines (Wednesdays) top the list, and I've had the privilege of attending my share of conferences (including speaking engagements at Inman Real Estate Connect NYC and Magazines Canada's annual conference). I've also been honing my production skills as editor of Amphora, a thrice-yearly magazine produced by the Alcuin Society.

Somewhere between the crunch of deadlines and the chaos of everyday life, I find time to just chill out in some new destination. Favourite discoveries this year? Walla Walla, WA; the restaurant at Marché in Eugene, OR; and the Main Street coffeehouse Gene.