Curated Tastes - Wine Tasting, Art Tours and Mediation

North Vancouver is a mecca for local artists, galleries, and similar. And what better way to get out and explore the local art scene than overlapping it with wine tasting and a walking tour. Notable mom-and-pop style wine-based businesses in the Lower Lonsdale Shipyards District include Amo Vino and Garden of Granite Winery. And with the fast-growing brewery district offerings, there is no telling when more local wine-based offerings will open and become available. Esplanade is really a booming area generally.

In this article, we have the pleasure to chat with Miret Rodriguez who is the co-founder and operator of Curated Tastes, which offers a first-of-its-kind blend of wine tasting, art tourism, and art mediation in a fun, friendly, networking focused manner. This is the kind of thing you want to do often to meet new people and try the local wine scene as it evolves. Check out more about her cool local business in the magazine feature below and connect with them at the bottom of the article.

What is Curated Tastes, what do you offer and how did it get started?

Curates Tastes is Metro Vancouver’s first and only art mediation company whose mission is to help Vancouverites connect with art and the people that create and enjoy it. This means that we create fun, engaging, and interactive art events, guided visits, studio visits, gallery hops, art walks, art talks, art-inspired creations, art history, and art appreciation classes, art tours, and more to make contemporary art approachable and relatable while introducing Vancouverites to their local art scene.

Curated Tastes got started as a natural extension of what I do in my daily life. I wanted to share the incredible and meaningful experience that it is to appreciate, live with art, and be part of the art community.

Tell us more about your art tours and wine tasting events that take place in the Lower Lonsdale Shipyards District of North Vancouuver?

In addition to helping Vancouverites feel closer to art, one of our main tenets is to foster friendships and create personal connections with individuals and businesses in Vancouver.

We believe that friendships are created through shared interests and experiences and that local businesses become an important part of the identity of a neighborhood. This is why we incorporate a social component in our tours like the wine tasting session at Garden of Granite Winery after having connected with the local histories, artworks, and people at Cityscape Community Artspace and Polygon Gallery. We treat each tour with the individual attention they deserve and create a unique narrative and experience for each.

The North Vancouver Gallery Hop and Wine Tasting Tour on April 2, 2022, was inspired by the exhibitions on view in which we saw a commonality: the close links between art and science and the human fascination with measuring and documenting what we perceive and see.

With the exhibition ‘I wanted to go on a spacewalk but I had nothing to wear’ at Cityscape, we learned and spoke about the space that women in science still need to fight for, their contribution to the development of science, and the experience of inhabiting a women’s body in the 21st century. With ‘Cloud Album’ at Polygon Gallery we continued the conversation about the intangibility of Outer Space, the sky, and of course clouds through the history of vernacular, artistic, and scientific photography.

How do you find the overlap of wine and art allows the end-user to expand their enjoyment of both?

With all of our art mediation activities, we tell stories, bring forward deep talk, and try to inspire our audience. We know that while our audience listens and experiences our tours, their minds are going to places and they have their own stories and reflections to share and develop. We find that there is no better way to facilitate these conversations than through an ‘outside-of-the-classroom’ experience. Gathering at a local winery, restaurant, coffee shop, brewery, or bar, allows us to mingle in a relaxed and more familiar environment.

These spaces are as much part of the tour as the cultural venues that we visit. We get greeted by the owners or managers who share the story of their space and products with us. We get to learn and connect with them as much as we connect with the galleries and artists. We learned for example how Nicenothings a NorthShore street artist, designed the label for Garden of Granite’s ‘What Happens now?’ wine. The wine is named after the winery’s uncertain future when they bottled that wine. It’s little stories like these that make our tours enjoyable and inspiring.

How can local art studios, wineries, and cideries get involved with your business?

Just say hi and reach out, please! We are constantly creating new tours and unearthing stories as we go. Contact details are below.

Outside of operating your business, what do you get up to for fun in your personal time?

Having 1:1 morning coffee with my girls reinvigorates me and them. Many of us work from home and find that these morning meetings help us focus on our projects and jobs. This morning I got to spend quality time with one of them while walking around Lost Lagoon and the Rose Garden in Stanley Park. We got to pinch ourselves and be thankful for living in such a beautiful city.

But in all honesty, what I truly do for fun overlaps with my ‘job’. I like having conversations with artists, asking them questions, checking out local exhibitions with friends, visiting artist studios, listening to art history podcasts, and watching videos on Youtube about nature and science.

Curated Tastes is really a natural extension of my passion for sharing everything about the arts with the people that surround me.

I also love, love, love that we can now attend concerts, plays, and contemporary dance events! I really missed these experiences during the pandemic.

Lastly, is there anything else you would like the community to know about you or Curated Tastes?

Please help this girl help her local art community by coming to several of our tours, attending our classes, and by telling your friends, family, and co-workers about Curated Tastes! We also organize ‘private’ tours. Meaning that if you and your friends, family and/or co-workers are wanting to do something fun in Metro Vancouver, we’ve got you covered! Private tours don’t have any additional costs; they simply happen at your convenience. So don’t be shy and please book away!