An upcoming wine festival taking place here in Victoria will celebrate and expose attendees to wines from around the world. As an added bonus, students checking out the event might find a pathway to an interesting career, according to one of the presenters.
Stuart Brown, a local sommelier who graduated from the International Sommelier Guild and is now a teacher for the guild himself, says that some of his students are coming out of college in their early 20s and are already studying to be sommeliers.
“It’s a credible career now and it’s an educational trade that I love,” says Brown. “And the reason why I love wine is it’s international and it’s about a specific place. It’s not like beer and spirits, where you can make it anywhere. It’s not about where the products are coming from; with wine the fruit is grown in a specific place and it speaks to that place.”
The inaugural Victoria Wine Festival, which takes place on September 26, is a day-long series of wine testings and seminars, including Brown’s look at the lesser-known Loire wine region in France.
“The reason I wanted to get right into that region is because the Loire isn’t very popular, and it’s not because of quality or anything else,” says Brown, “it’s just not as known as other regions like Bordeaux or Burgundy, so I wanted to do the seminar on that, just for exposure.”
Brown, who got his sommelier diploma in 2006, says that France is a big part of his program’s studies.
“If you look at our textbook, France is almost half of our textbook because it’s such a big part of the world of wine,” he says.
Brown points to the wines in the Loire region as being some of the most unique in all of France due to the soils and climates being quite different there, something he’ll talk about during his presentation at the festival.
“What’s so cool about France is it was developed before automobiles, so while over here we have things from all over the place, in France they are very traditional to what they make right there, so every little village has its own unique cheese and wine, and foods that go with both,” he says.
Brown says that he’s excited about the upcoming Victoria Wine Festival, the first wine festival in the city in a number of years, and this time with a more international focus.
“It’s been a long time since something like this has happened,” he says, “and it’s good to have something local, as well as international. A lot of the wine festivals we have in British Columbia are BC-oriented, but this one also has international wines, which is very cool.”
Victoria Wine Festival
Friday, September 26
Parkside Hotel, 810 Humboldt
vicwf.com