Plato reportedly once said, “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
How inspiring. Now let’s add a little wine to the music or music to the wine, and we become uplifted, joyous. Stress is released, tongues and ties loosen, friends and lovers unite, and the world becomes a happier place.
Music and wine – a glorious coupling, a gift from the gods sent to relieve humankind from the daily worries and woes.
Does that sound a little too much? A little exaggerated? Or somewhat familiar?
Now let’s take this party up a notch. Let’s add music that elevates and exercises the ear and mind with delicate harmonies, robust base notes, and a unique blend of string, wind and percussion. And let’s add wines that are complex, decadent, and dense, with depth and layers of flavor and concentration.
Welcome to Lunessence.
Visitors to this unique boutique winery may be greeted by notes of Verdi, Paganini, or Puccini. The classical music is piped through the vineyards, winery and cellar. It vibrates through body, mind, bottle and wine encouraging harmonious growth and enhancing fermentation with elegant melodies and delicate notes.
Lunessence sits between two wetlands beside Giant’s Head hill in Summerland, where visitors can enjoy a glass of wine and a picnic on the patio while admiring the view of the valley. Maintaining the natural balance of the surrounding environment is of great importance to winemaker Michal Mosny and wife, Martina. They use eco friendly and sustainable viticulture practices to maintain the health of both the terroir and the wetlands that are so vital for the local bird population. The biodynamic vineyard management techniques include harvesting by the phases of the moon, a practice that only the most dedicated vintners undertake.
Michal makes the wine and Martina tends the vineyard. It’s a close and harmonious relationship with the utmost care and attention given to every aspect of winemaking, from the growing of vines to the bottling of the wines.
Mass production is not the goal here, and quality not quantity is the focus. A wise strategy, for Lunessence wines are quickly becoming well known and selling out fast. Those who are unable to visit the winery may want to join the wine club, Amadeus, to secure wine releases held exclusively for wine club members.
This year, available only to members is a Petit Verdot 2016 and Muscat 2016. Members will also have access to a limited quantity of the Cabernet Sauvignon 2015.
For the extremely reasonable annual fee of $150, members receive 6 bottles of wine selected by Michal. The fee includes free delivery, free tastings all year around for members and their visiting friends, free shipping all year around, and premium access to new releases. There are no hidden transactions, all members will receive notification prior to shipping, and cancellation is free.
In addition, each year there will be select speciality wines made only for Amadeus wine club members.
Michal and Martina are proud, but also humble about the success of their wines; fortunate and happy that the wines created by nature are so well received and appreciated by savvy wine lovers.
For 2017, they are also preparing also a new red blend called Crescendo. This will be their signature red blend made from Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec. Expressing all these varietals, the wine should be a crescendo of flavours. They hope customers will be as pleased with the results as they were when watching this blend develop in the barrels.
Their dessert wines are, quite honestly, the most delicious elixirs of joy. Catch them if you can – the Late Harvest Essence and two Icewines, a Merlot and Riesling.
Music and wine make a partnership most divine, and as Ludwig van Beethoven reportedly once said, “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.”
This analogy by Ludwig may be a little grandiose, but at Lunessence, the wine is indeed glorious: lovingly grown, musically enhanced, and traditionally made by a classically trained winemaker.
~ Henrietta Poirier