Rotary SUNRISE members and guests enjoying the wine tasting. L-R Novelette Ebanks, Velma Hewitt, Gordon Hewitt, and Des Ebanks.
While the primary focus of Rotary Sunrise is a service club maybe to help in the local community by fund raising for good causes together with a fair number of hands-on projects, the members also like to have fun.
Fellowship is encouraged and important to keep the group focused and as a result the Sunrisers have decided to form a Wine Society. The club meets normally for breakfast which is not an ideal time for wine tasting so they have decided to meet in members' homes on the last Thursday evening of every month and invite an expert to speak about the wine industry in general and a chosen range of wines in particular. Members say they have discovered that there are a number of wine experts in Cayman - interestingly many of them are lawyers and a fair sprinkling of accountants too.
Their first meeting was on Thursday 27 July when Grant Stein who owns a vineyard in Spain, explained the basics of the industry, described how wine is made and stored and took a lot of the mystique out of the business.
"His presentation was fascinating and very educational," said Geoff Matthews, spokesperson and member of Rotary Sunrise.
"The 70 members and guests who were there enjoyed the tasting and the inside story of operating a vineyard. Almost everybody has dreamed of owning a pub or a restaurant but a vineyard rarely comes into the dream. Apparently it is not easy. Like farming, the weather or plant disease can destroy your crop and, with it, any hope of profit."
Mr Matthews said that Grant Stein is originally from Scotland. He and his wife Anne have lived in the Cayman Islands for the last 26 years. Mr Stein's day job is as a Global Managing Partner of the law firm, Walkers.
However, he moonlights as a wine producer.
"Grant has been interested in wine since he was at University in Scotland, when one of his passions was making home-made wine," Mr Matthews added.
" It was about that time he said to Anne that he only wanted to be a lawyer until he could buy his own vineyard. Although he is still a lawyer, he did manage to buy a vineyard in Spain in 1998. However, it was just a field of vines. The designing and building of the winery came next. It was just finished for the 1999 harvest. Since then, it has been expanded and now has a production capacity of around 300,000 bottles per year."
The vineyard and winery is called Estancia Piedra. Estancia is the Spanish equivalent of Chateau and Piedra means "stone" in Spanish, the same as Stein in German.
Estancia Piedra wines have won some of the most prestigious awards in Spain and in other countries.
The estate's Paredinas 1999 won Decanter Magazine's 5-Star award in 2003, putting it in the top 3% of all wines rated by Decanter Magazine that year.
Almost all the estate's wines appear in the prestigious Proensa "Golden Guide" of the top 500 wines of Spain and also in the top 50 wines of Castilla y Leon. The wines are available in Cayman at Jacques Scott outlets.
Rotary SUNRISE now has 72 members, mostly young professionals from the Cayman Islands and 14 other Countries. They intend to use their international connection to taste and learn about wines from the countries of their members. Next meeting is South African wines and later wines from Australia and a blind tasting of premium Champagnes.
