Stir Wine Pairing: virtual West Coast Modern Home Tour is made for dreaming
West Vancouver Art Museum’s filmic fundraiser calls for some of the region’s best Vietnamese food and an elegant Upper Bench Estate Chardonnay
The Merrick House. (Photo by Paul Merrick Architect, 1972).
Wooden Fish Vietnamese Cuisine; Upper Bench Winery & Creamery 2018 Estate Chardonnay.
Every week, Stir Wine Pairing suggests BC wine and food to go with a local arts event.
The event
West Vancouver Art Museum’s virtual West Coast Modern Home Tour
The food
Takeout from Wooden Fish Vietnamese Cuisine
The wine
Upper Bench Winery & Creamery’s 2018 Estate Chardonnay
The lowdown
Even if you’ll never be able to afford a house that makes it onto the West Coast Modern Home Tour, you can still dream, or at least appreciate their architecture and design.
The West Vancouver Art Museum has been offering this tour of mid-century and contemporary homes as its primary fundraiser since 2006. This year’s edition is a virtual affair in the form of an hour-long film by Jesse Laver of Laver Creative. Presented by British Pacific Properties Limited, the film explores five homes and takes a brief look at one more.
Consider the Eppich I House designed by Arthur Erickson in 1972 (and renovated in 2015 by BattersbyHowat Architects); the West Coast post and beam aesthetic in concrete is one of Erickson’s most significant residential designs, testament to the pillar of sustainability being rooted in good design. Or take the Merrick home, which Paul Merrick designed in 1972 as his family residence; it sits on a wooded hillside surrounded by forest. An open-floor plan was cast aside in favour of a complex network of intimate spaces connected by short flights of stairs. This “Carpenter Gothic” home is the amalgamation of varying influences: Japanese minimalism, medieval architecture, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Focal points in the cathedral-like space are a 40-foot stone fireplace and a stained-glass window located directly underneath a bed gallery that hovers over the main space. Then there are the hand-carved beams inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and floorboards milled from logs on Vancouver Island.
Hosted by West Vancouver Art Museum curator Hilary Letwin, the film features interviews with homeowners Ross Bonetti and Martha Sturdy, among others, as well as architects and designers such as Paul Merrick, David Battersby and Heather Howat of BattersbyHowat Architects, Lisa Bovell and Matt McLeod of McLeod Bovell Modern Houses, and Cedric Burgers.
The film is available for streaming for one week starting July 10 at 11 am PDT, or you can take in a live, in-person viewing plus panel discussion at the Key Meek Arts Centre on July 10 from 4 to 6 pm PDT.
The food
Since we’re in the ’hood, we’re going to stick with a pick from West Van. Wooden Fish Vietnamese Cuisine (1403 Marine Drive) is owned and operated by a team of life-long friends: Uyên Nghiem and wife-husband duo Betty and Leng Nguyen. Each is originally from a different part of Vietnam, and they’ve designed a menu that reflects the country’s diverse regions and features many of their favourite dishes from childhood made with premium ingredients.
Cha gio man are crispy spring rolls wrapped in a unique type of rice paper that the team imports from Vietnam and fills with ground pork, shrimp, taro, jicama, carrot, wood-ear fungus, shitake mushroom, and vermicelli. Satay sauce accompanies grilled baby octopus (bach tuoc nuong), while ca nuong, or grilled sablefish on dill and onion, comes on a sizzling hot pan with Vietnamese greens and herbs and vermicelli. Fresh salad rolls are standouts: try goi cuon sai gon: steamed prawns with herbs, lettuce, and vermicelli in light and textured rice paper with peanut or fish sauce. There’s green papaya salad, pho, meat and seafood skewers, and more. Everything is made in-house, right down to the condiments that burst with flavour, like Thai-pepper dressing and pickled garlic.
The pairing
Food this carefully and lovingly crafted calls for an elegant wine. Upper Bench Winery & Creamery is unique in that it’s the country’s only producer of both wine and cheese right on-site. Winemaker Gavin Miller takes a minimalist approach, tending vines by hand without using any synthetic herbicides, fungicides, or pesticides. The 2018 Estate Chardonnay is splurge-worthy. The winery excels in Chardonnay generally, and they consider this one its most impressive to date. It’s a small-batch Chardonnay that was fermented utilizing the natural yeasts present on the grape skins in brand new French oak barrels, then aged in those same vessels. The wine is textured, complex, and balanced with hints of apple, pear, and beautiful (but not overpowering) oak. (The Estate Chardonnay is $35 via the winery.) It’s perfect with those Saigon rolls, and for dreaming.
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