Wine sippers have been known to spill a few words –– in vino veritas, loose lips and all that –– but an event coming to Vernon Sunday pairs viniculture with words in a whole new way.
Part of the newly vamped Okanagan Summer Wine Festival, the Valley First Polson Pouring, taking place in Vernon’s Polson Park from 3 to 6 p.m., not only features 32 valley-based wineries pouring their selected libation, it also has six spoken word artists who will entertain with poetry, stories and selected works in an art form that is gaining steam all over the world.
“We’ve been trying to find an event that will set us apart from the festival other than the usual music accompanying the wine and food,” said Michelle Jefferson, Vernon Tourism manager. “Spoken word is a unique art form. It can range from story telling to slam poetry… This is an opportunity to expose Vernon to this newer art form with a slight twist.”
It is also one of the ways the Okanagan Wine Festival Society is starting over with its summer wine festival. Held the past nine years at Silver Star Mountain Resort, the festival is now a valley-wide, 10-day-long, outdoor wine-tasting event.
“The summer festival was a great success at Silver Star but we simply outgrew it,” said Blair Baldwin, coordinator with the Okanagan Wine Festival Society. “We now have 104-member wineries, and there has been a huge growth in the industry. Our spring and fall festivals are already valley-wide. We’ve done consumer studies and this has been two years in the planning. It’s good economics with the supply and demand of tourists and other visitors to have an early to mid-July wine festival broadened to other communities.”
The festival society has also received full support and interest from all the tourism bureaus in the Okanagan to promote the events around the valley.
“This will also be the first outdoor wine festival we’ve held right in Vernon and we’ve had excellent cooperation from the city. We’re watching the weather network, hoping for sunny skies,” said Baldwin.
Vernon Tourism is committed for three years to host a summer wine festival event in town, said Jefferson, adding that the newly renovated Polson Park is the preferred venue.
“As we move forward, we will see how it goes,” she said. “Polson Park is such a magnificent park. We want to show it off. We plan on growing this over the next year.”
The inaugural Polson Pouring will also be the first time a spoken word event of this magnitude has taken place in the North Okanagan.
It was business students at Okanagan College’s Kalamalka campus who came up with the marketing plan to stage a spoken word event.
Local publisher Robert MacDonald, a founding director of the Okanagan Institute, lined up the artists to perform.
“Spoken word encompasses all artists/writers working in the oral tradition,” said MacDonald. “This includes jazz, dub, hip hop and slam writers, storytellers, folklorists and folk writers. Spoken word can encompass word, story, language, rhythm, sound, music, and beat. It is generally written and presented in the voice and tone of the people. It is for the people. It represents the community.”
Artists scheduled to perform at Sunday’s event include Cathryn Wellner, Jarrod Thalheimer, Harold Rhenisch, Sara Bynoe, Cameron Welch and Karin Wilson, with Betty Selin of Sun FM as master of ceremonies.
“Many of them have been involved in workshops at UBC Okanagan through the creative writing studies there,” said Jefferson, adding the wine festival will help put Vernon on the cultural map.
“There has been a lot of interest in the arts community about this. We are looking at this as a kind of fringe festival where we can activate the rest of the community and make the park hum with a cultural-type festival.”
Tickets for Sunday’s Valley First Polson Pouring are $59 each, available at Select Your Tickets, 250-717-5304, or www.selectyourtickets.com. A free taxi ride home, as well as appetizers and a wine glass, are included in the price. For more information on other Okanagan Summer Wine Festival events, pick up a brochure at the local tourism centre, or where wine is sold, or go to the society’s website at www.thewinefestivals.com.
