Miradoro Restaurant, British Columbia’s premiere winery restaurant, is pleased to announce The Communal Table, its weekly late-harvest dining series featuring fine Okanagan ingredients. The destination restaurant at Tinhorn Creek offers stunning panoramic views of the South Okanagan Valley wine country and features Mediterranean-influenced cuisine that showcases the region’s finest ingredients.
Premiering Tuesday, November 22nd, The Communal Table will bring together locals and visitors to celebrate regional food and wine and friends both old and new. Carefully crafted by Executive Chef Jeff Van Geest, the first of the series’ weekly-changing family style menus opens with a light salad of lettuces dressed in good olive oil and vinegar with preserved summer tomatoes and soft-boiled egg. Beef Kalimotxo Cocido, a rich one-pot meal of Okanagan’s Finest Angus Beef neck braised in red wine and cola with local vegetables, porcini mushrooms, potatoes and broad beans, is a hearty main course served as multiple dishes. Fresh cheese with Similkameen honey and Agassiz hazelnuts is a delightful third course, while chestnut and marsala cake with amoretti and dulce de leche gelato round out the meal.
In keeping with Miradoro Restaurant’s food philosophy, The Communal Table will feature fare that is local, rustic, simple, straightforward and seasonal. In the kitchen, Executive Chef Jeff Van Geest is guided by the belief that there’s nothing better than simple, well-prepared ingredients from our local fields, forests and ocean. Drawing inspiration from Spain, Portugal and Italy – cuisines designed to pair perfectly with wine — Van Geest works closely with local farmers and producers to pay homage to the bounty of the Okanagan.
Held at 6:30pm on Tuesdays from November 22nd until the end of the year, The Communal Table menu is $25 per person. Reservations are required. Individual dates will be cancelled if a Christmas party is booked.
The cool spring this year meant that Andrew Moon, our viticulturist, and Sandra Oldfield, our winemaker, had to carefully monitor the vineyard to ensure that the grapes would reach full ripeness. The cool spring and slightly later start to the summer weather pushed the start date of harvest back almost 2 weeks. We started our harvest on September 28 with Pinot Gris from our Diamondback Vineyard on the Black Sage Bench. In a perfect year once harvest starts it is fairly constant with maybe a day or two here and there that we do not pick. This year there were three or four days in between picking days which really seemed to make harvest drag out, but also made for a much more relaxed harvest... until the end of October. Around October 26 the temperatures took a nose dive and the vineyard and cellar teams had some very long days as they worked constantly to bring in most of our reds. Luckily for us by this time the reds were ripe enough to harvest thanks to Andrew's management of the vineyard prior to harvest.
We did have one block of Cabernet Franc that Andrew and Sandra felt was not going to reach full ripeness (as the rest of the Cabernet Franc blocks would), but it would perfect for a rose. After some deliberation and monitoring, to see if it would ripen further, the decision was then made to harvest that one block of Cabernet Franc specifically for a rose. In total we will have just under 1400 cases of 2011 Oldfield Series Rose and it will only be available at the winery and Miradoro Restaurant. To forewarn you though... For the 2012 vintage the rose will go back to being a very limited production (200-300 cases) and will only be available to our Crush Club members and at Miradoro Restaurant.