Welcome to Vancouver’s ‘other’ wine festival. While the Vancouver International Wine Festival has for many years been the standard-bearer for big wine events in Western Canada, Top Drop offers a compelling, fresh alternative for both the trade and consumers alike. Inaugurated in 2014, Top Drop brings together some of the world’s most innovative, passionate winemakers and their diverse wines, all in a relaxed, unstuffy, lower-key environment. Many of the invited wineries are small-scale, family-owned, boutique producers who can manage the relatively lower cost bar for participating in this event. Not that larger producers are entirely absent: high-quality big guns such Catena Zapata (Argentina), Gerard Bertrand and La Chablisienne (France), and Zeni (Italy) have all participated and added lustre to the event.
The 2026 edition of Top Drop has just rolled through Vancouver, and what a fabulous wine-focused couple of days it has been. It began yesterday with a wine and barbecue breakfast. Yes, you read that correctly. I have a longstanding, self-imposed rule: no wine before 6:00 PM (unless I’m on vacation and in another country). I am usually pretty good at sticking to this. However, as an ex-South African and founder of the former Cape Wine Society here in BC, I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of ‘Safrican’ wine producers over a breakfast braai (barbecue). Which is how I found myself sipping Cape Chenin Blanc, eating braai’d boerewors sausage for breakfast and chatting in Afrikaans with several Cape winemakers at 9:00 am on a sunny Monday morning here in Vancouver, halfway around the world from South Africa! The highlight for me was meeting, for the first time, one of South Africa’s most respected winemakers, Eben Sadie of the eponymously named family winery. Eben takes a very terroir-focused, minimal intervention, hands-off approach to his winemaking, and his Rotsbank Swartland Chenin Blanc 2024 is a case in point: liminal, pure, saline, mineral and utterly un-embellished by any oak, it was the perfect (if alarmingly early) start to my wine day.
Jasper Wickens is another talented young winemaker also based in the Swartland, that wide-open region of rolling wheat- and vine-covered hills northeast of Cape Town. Jasper’s winery is called Swerwer, and for breakfast he poured both his Chenin Blanc 2023 and a beguiling 2023 red blend of Cinsault, Grenache and Tinta Barocca, which at just 12.5% alcohol by volume was more refreshing and juicy than one may have anticipated. A revelation.
Three more Cape wineries—Idun, Meerlust and Spier—rounded out the morning wine and bbq offering.
Today—Tuesday 12 May—it was the full monty: Some 75 wineries from 15 countries were pouring their wares at the over-subscribed trade tasting, held in Vancouver’s Roundhouse Community Centre. There were far too many highlights to cover here. Suffice to say that this event is a standout survey of some of the world’s most interesting, innovative, and sometimes quirky wineries, from a range of regions both famous and some far less so. In the former category would be wines representing such regions as France’s Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Italy’s Montalcino and Australia’s Barossa Valley, while the latter were amply represented by wines from such diverse regions as Greece’s Amyndeon, Austria’s Langenlois (Kamptal), and Canada’s Okanagan Falls, to name just three. Tasting distinctive, uniquely characterful wines—made with passion and dedication—from regions such as these and many more renews one’s faith in the wine industry, even as it faces several mounting global challenges. The world needs more wine.
Thanks go out to the Top Drop team for organizing this fantastic event. Long may it continue.
