Stir Pairing: the weekend brings spinning album covers, sakura-themed food, and B.C. sparkling wine

Here’s an idea to pass pandemic time: visit the Commotion’s new online exhibition, order cherry blossom-inspired takeout from Yuwa, and sip Corcellette’s Santé

By Gail Johnson

Jonas Yip’s Rio (24x24, Edition 1 of 5, Archival Pigment Print [Baryta Fine Art Paper]) is from Thirty Three + a Third, his new exhibition at the Commotion Online Viewing Room.

Sakura-themed dishes are on the menu throughout April at Yuwa Japanese Cuisine (which offers takeout and patio dining); we’re getting it to go to have with Corcelettes Estate Winery’s frizzante.

Every week, Stir Wine Pairing suggests BC wine and food to go with a local arts event.

The event

Thirty Three + a Third at the Commotion Online Viewing Room, to May 8

The food

Sakura-themed takeout from Yuwa Japanese Cuisine

The drink

Corcelettes Estate Winery’s 2019 Santé Frizzante

The lowdown

Another COVID-19 weekend, another opportunity to make the most of it. One option is a visit to the Commotion Online Viewing Room for its latest exhibition—a sensory one with one with colour, motion, and music.

Curated by Peppa Martin, Thirty Three + a Third is California-based photographic artist Jonas Yip’s homage to albums—and the days of poring over every detail of their covers. For people of a certain generation, it was part of the whole listening experience.  

“Over time the album cover itself came to represent the music… seeing the object and the art on the record shelf was enough to trigger the feeling of listening to the album,” Yip says in his artist statement. “Today, unfortunately, that album cover art has been almost completely lost: an afterthought, relegated to appear only as pixels on a small screen as a song comes up on our smartphones, if at all.

“For my project, I set out to conceptually merge this forgotten album art and the spin of the record player to create a sensory experience of motion and music,” says Yip, whose work can be found in the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Art, the National Museum of Chinese Literature in Beijing, and the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, among other places. “Each extended exposure transforms the original cover art, chosen from albums that were important to my own personal musical development, into an abstraction of color and motion, evoking the feeling of listening to music in earlier days, when watching the record spinning on the turntable and poring over the album package were all an integral part of the experience.”

Jonas Yip, Rio.

Jonas Yip, Reckoning.

The menu 

It’s sakura season, with the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival now on and pink petals everywhere—and not just on trees. The blooms are also popping up on local menus, including that of Yuwa Japanese Cuisine.

Throughout April, the West Side restaurant is featuring sakura-themed dishes for takeout or patio dining.

French white asparagus is grilled with shiso shio-koji miso and topped with micro leaves and cherry blossoms. Sakura roll cake features custard cream, strawberry, pistachio, caramel lace tuilles, and mint, while Ranman 爛漫 (Cherry Flowers in Full Bloom) is a reversed sakura mochi wrapped with cherry blossom-coloured anko (bean paste).

Other springtime specials include Kurodai carpaccio with ohitashi spring vegetable (thinly sliced black sea bream with canola flower and asparagus, red cabbage, watercress) and grilled sawara saikyo yaki (Japanese Spanish mackerel marinated with sweet saikyo miso.

Takeout is available by calling the restaurant. (It has heated patio seats for 12 people with distancing in place, an 11-foot umbrella, lattice dividers, and greenery.)

The pairing

Corcelettes Estate Winery’s 2019 Santé Frizzante ($22.90) goes nicely with appies and seafood—just what Yuwa’s April menu calls for.

A blend of 80 percent Pinot Gris and 20 percent Chardonnay, the balanced bubbly is fresh and lively. It’s vegan, too: the Similkameen Valley winery’s organic practices include the use of kelp and seaweed products, plus a small resident herd of sheep for weeding, leaf removal, and soil fertility.

We dig that Corcelettes is donating $1 from every bottle sold until June to the BC Hospitality Foundation (BCHF), which provides last-resort assistance to hospitality workers in financial crisis due to a serious health condition. “We receive no government funding, and have had to cancel our in-person events, so initiatives like the one from Corcelettes are providing essential revenue that allows us to keep helping the people who need it most,” BCHF executive director Dana Harris said in a release.

We’ll drink to that.

Team members at Corcelletes Estate Winery tend to the vineyards.

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