Hazy Tippler

Last month, I took a trip up to Alaska. Our first stop on the way up was Vancouver, BC. While on the train ride up, I started looking for a decent place to have lunch. By decent, I mean a place with solid cocktails and good food that'd be walking distance from our hotel. All signs pointed to Uva Wine & Cocktail Bar.

The signs were not wrong. We had great food and seriously great drinks at Uva! Their drink menu is really quite impressive: interesting and complex cocktails, great wines and beer, and they even offer flights of wine or booze. With my lunch I had the Sour Rose and the Cricket Old Fashioned cocktails. My drinking partner, Glenn, started with a porter and then moved on to the Peater Rabbit.

Cricket Old Fashioned & Peater Rabbit at Uva.

I really liked the Sour Rose, and I asked our bartender, Jasmine, about the details. She revealed the secret ingredient is Harvest Song's Tea-Rose Petal preserves. The preserves smelled amazing, and I'll be picking some up soon. Glenn found his new favorite cocktail in the Peater Rabbit. He talked about that drink the whole trip, and now I'm on the hook for trying to recreate it the next time we meet.

And if this experience wasn't already good enough, after finishing lunch, I realized they also sell bitters! Uva's bar manager, Lauren Mote, produces her own line of bitters, called Bittered Sling. Lauren happened to be sitting at the bar, and she gave us the full rundown: flavor profiles, production methods, you name it. She really was most accommodating to our questions, and you could tell this was a passion for her. I ended up choosing the gift pack, which netted me 6 small bottles, because how can you choose just one? Importantly, the gift pack included the Plum & Rootbeer bitters that were in the Cricket Old Fashioned, so I can recreate that drink at home.

Uva Wine & Cocktail Bar was a stellar first stop on our trip, and I can't wait to get back there the next time I'm in Vancouver.