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PYRAMID POWER
Old world winemaking meets new age mysticism in the vineyards of British Columbia.

Text: KEVIN BROOKER

Whatever else it may be, Kelowna, B.C., is neither Old World nor New Age. Rather, it may best be described as a long strip mall, winding like the sinuous tail of the local sea monster, Ogopogo, through a valley of stucco mansions and speedboats and blond highlights. Retirees feel very unthreatened here.

It is therefore doubly surprising to find an enigmatic blend of both genres – the ancient and the faux-ancient – under the crystal-like roof of the Summerhill winery, perched divinely on a sun-washed flank of the Okanagan Valley south of the city.

In a business where aristocratic dabblers seem duty bound to possess grand designs and eccentric passions, Summerhill’s Stephen Cipes has trumped them all. Not enough that he’s the proprietor of Canada’s first traditionally crafted champagne house, but Cipes had to further distinguish himself by erecting the world’s most cosmic wine-aging facility: an imposing four-storey replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

If you ignore that – which you can’t – Summerhill looks like any other B.C. winery that has the requisite low-slung, stone-and-cedar estancia thing going on. There’s an elegant wood-panelled tasting room and, off that, a large terrace restaurant with an absolutely biblical view of Lake Okanagan a few hundred metres below. Rows of Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier vines spill down the slope, punctuated by dark mountains of composting grape seeds; Cipes’ 26-hectare terroir happens to be Canada’s largest organic vineyard.

It’s also the country’s most-visited winery, as evidenced by the Seattleite loading three cases of sparkling wine into the trunk of his Lexus. (At less than US$15 a bottle, why, it’s practically free.) Across the parking lot, the sixth tour bus of the day idles in the parking lot, while its Taiwanese passengers take snapshots in front of a big, honking bottle of Cipes Brut that hovers in mid-air above the koi pond, eternally topping up a flute in what’s rather grandiosely called the World Peace Park.

Yet another tour is beginning with the saga of New York-born Cipes, who went from flipping yachts in high school to selling choice Westchester real estate. Known as the Boy Broker, he made enough to cash out, at the age of 43, in 1986. Like many a hippie before him, Cipes had nursed a hankering for the land, and the sun-blessed Okanagan filled the bill. "When I first came here," recalls the elfin, shorts-and-sandals-clad Cipes, "all I wanted was to work the earth, to grow grapes."

He bought a historic plot that was planted in vines good only for "box wines," and for a while that contented him. Then he brought in an expert, who pronounced the land perfect for producing sparkling wines. So Cipes was off to Champagne, France, to obtain rootstock and to learn the secrets of blending and secondary fermentation in the bottle that comprise la methode champenoise.

It is a fussy, labour-intensive process. Each day, a crew performs the hand-riddling, the traditional method of giving some 10,000 sparkling wine bottles a quarter-turn, coaxing the residue from an inoculation of yeast into the bottle’s neck, later to be frozen and then, in a grand flourish, disgorged before corking.

Produced from a small winery in a garage, Summerhill’s first cuvée was the 1991 Cipes Gabriel, named for one of the proprietor’s sons. In 2000, a later vintage earned one of five golds in the sparkling wine category at the prestigious French wine competition Chardonnay-du-Monde. More than 15,000 artisanally crafted cases are now produced each year, and the vast majority are sold on the premises. Of the few bottles that make it off the estate for retail sale, none is sold in a government-monopoly liquor store; Cipes, in suitably counterculture fashion, doesn’t believe in them.

But what he does believe in is pyramids.

At first, it was a small plywood version used for storage, just another funky B.C. outbuilding. Cipes doesn’t mention anything about the pyramid’s ability to sharpen razor blades or perfectly mummify cats, but he soberly claims that 14 years of experimentation have convinced him that it bequeaths near-magical effects on anything stored in it. Milk doesn’t sour; it turns to yogurt. Frozen orange juice develops the taste of fresh-squeezed. And as for wines, he reports, "good ones just get better – although if there’s a flaw, it actually gets worse. But that’s a small price to pay." Not everyone agrees. Pyramid power is, according to one Canadian wine writer who has stood beneath the apex, "a load of hooey. If it was that easy, every winemaker in the world would use it."

Whatever celestial mojo Gaia confers upon pyramids, Cipes has sought to maximize it in his latest construction, the first of a planned series of three. An eight-percent scale version of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, it is likewise sited in cardinal precision and built without any electrical wiring or ferrous metals to threaten its pristine energy flow. Every Summerhill wine spends up to three months aging in its remarkable year-round ambient temperature of 17ºC. The pyramid will eventually be finished with the five container-loads of white limestone on order from Giza itself, plus a capstone of gleaming gold.

It seems mystical enough as another tour group – Japanese, this time – troops up the candlelit staircase into the sanctum sanctorum, a darkened vault with the power to make you feel big and small at the same time. Standing amid the shrink-wrapped pallets of wine that crowd the space, the tour guide compels her group to hold up their hands in a circle to feel the divine energy as it radiates through the chamber.

The Japanese exchange polite but quizzical looks that seem to say, "Sure, it’s flaky, but you have to admit it’s pretty damn cool. Now let’s go buy some bubbly!"