Pour the wine, skip the small talk

Bob prefers drinking to talkiing when he pours at Spring Vale Winery in Cranbrook. Photo by David Lansing.

There’s more to life than just oysters. There’s also wine. Good wine. Dry wine. To go with the oysters. So our tour dude, Brad, his body half turned to face us while he spins stories about Cole Bay and the Aborigines who first took a liking to the oysters, guns his minibus through the hairpin turns as if he were driving a Ferrari as we all lurch first left and then right, hoping like hell there isn’t another car coming the other way down this twisted country road, delivering us to Spring Vale Winery in Cranbrook.

The first thing everyone does when they exit the minibus is flee for the restrooms. Perhaps to take a pee, more likely to recover from the drive. “My god,” one woman confesses to me, “I thought for sure we were going to die.”

I don’t tell her that one reason Brad the Tour Dude is rushing us is because I took him aside at the oyster farm and told him that we absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt had to finish the tour by four because there was a scheduled whisky tasting on board the Orion at five. Priorities.

After everyone has a little private time in the loos, we gather inside what looks like an old sheep barn that has been converted into the Spring Vale tasting room where we are greeted by…no one. The place is empty.

“Bob must be out in the vineyard,” says Brad the Tour Dude. He walks out to his minibus, thrusts an arm into the open window, and starts honking the horn incessantly. Within a couple of minutes, a balding young man pulls up on a tractor in front of the tasting room. This is Robert Elliot, the vineyard supervisor and, today, in charge of the tasting room. Without saying a word, Bob sets out a dozen tasting glasses on the bar and starts pouring a Riesling. We all stand there, waiting for him to tell us about the wine. But Bob tells us to grab a glass and start drinking.

I don’t like to talk much about the wine, he says. If you’ve got a question, ask it. Otherwise, I’ll just pour and you can just drink.

I like that approach.

Down the hatch go tastings of a sparkling wine, a couple of Reislings, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, and Chardonnay. As we’re sampling the Reislings, someone asks Bob what the difference is between the two wines. Bob shrugs. “Some people say one thing and others say another,” he says.

Well, I can’t really tell much difference, says the guy.

“That’s okay,” says Bob, “I can’t either.”

After the whites, we get pours of three different Pinot Noirs and a Cabernet. “Any questions?” asks Bob. No one has any questions. “All-righty, then,” says Bob. And he leaves the tasting room, climbs back on his tractor, and heads back out into the vineyards.

“Time to go,” says Brad the Tour Dude. And we climb back into the minibus for the one-hour tortuous drive back to Cole Bay and our whisky tasting.