The Prince and the Pyramid: Ezra Cipes + Prince Charles

The story of the prince and the pyramid is one of the odder tales to emerge from Canada Calling, a wine industry delegation held in London, England last month. The classy, groundbreaking summit was a huge boon for the industry; esteemed British wine writers Jamie Goode, Hugh Johnson and Steven Spurrier were all impressed by our “remarkable” syrah and “brilliant” chardonnay.

But as Canadian John Szabos astutely points out in his glowing review, Canada can’t compete on value. We need “cool” stories to sell our wine to the world.

So here’s one.

While the rest of the Canuck contingent was busy schmoozing Britain’s elite wine buyers and scribes, B.C.’s Ezra Cipes, CEO of Summerhill Pyramid Winery — one of the province’s most unique vineyards — snuck away for a little side trip to The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts.

This quirky college in Shoreditch is the pulpit from which the Prince of Wales preaches his far-out theories on architecture and divine order. As argued in his book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, Prince Charles truly believes that there is an innate harmony and interconnectedness of all things, and that most of the world’s problems could be resolved through the principles of sacred geometry.

Sure, the prince’s royal mission to realign city planning with the natural universe has been widely criticized as wonky, if not downright disturbing for the heir to throne.

But every dogma must have its drink. What if the prince’s sacred geometry were christened with a sparkling wine aged in a hallowed chamber imbued with the same principles and bursting with grandness of nature? Forget this world’s problems. Such a potent consecration might just unravel the secret mysteries of the cosmos!

Enter Summerhill Pyramid Winery. The family-owned estate in Kelowna, B.C., makes award-winning organic and biodynamic wines that are aged on-site in a pyramid cellar to evoke “the knowingness of eternity” and “create a structure of stillness and harmony.”

This is no rinky-dink, dime-store pyramid. It is four-story-high, 3,249-square-foot, eight per-cent replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, aligned to the stars and built according to the strict principles of absolute sacred geometry, both pi and phi. Even before the ground was broken, surveyors conducted an exhaustive check of interfering energies (underground streams, electric currents, gas lines, etc) and an astronomer was consulted to align the foundation with absolute True North.

Skeptics might sniff, but that pyramid must have some sort of magical properties because the wines have been awarded some of the world’s highest honours, including a special trophy naming Summerhill “Canadian Wine Producer of the Year” at the 2009 International Wine & Spirit Competition.

Could there possibly be another winery in the entire universe more symbiotically suited for the way-out Prince of Wales? Not likely.

Ezra Cipes might not be as eccentric as his father, Stephen, the visionary behind the pyramid. But he knows good synergy when he senses it. Before going to London, he made an appointment with Victoria Chester, executive director of the Prince’s Foundation, in hopes of becoming an official wine sponsor.

“When I walked into the School of Traditional Arts, all my hair stood up on end,” he explains. “It wasn’t posh, as I expected. It felt a bastion of high consciousness. It was an incredible place. It felt like joy. I wanted to hop up and down.”

Okay, maybe Cipes is a little eccentric. But Chester was also feeling the energy when Cipes presented her with two rare bottles of Cipes Gabriel, which won the trophy for Best International Bottle-Fermented Sparkling Wine at the IWSC in 2010.

“A shiver just went up my spine,” she cried, after learning that the wine had been aged in a pyramid. “Oh, the boss is going to love this!”

Cipes doesn’t want to be presumptuous. He says he received a very nice letter of thanks from Clarence House this week, yet still doesn’t know if his Royal Highness has actually tasted the wine or has any desire to be associated with Summerhill. We still think it sounds like a match made in heaven. At the very least, it’s a pretty cool story to tell.

Related Link: Yes, Sometimes We Judge Our Wines By Their Labels

Would you try “pyramid cellar” wine? Let us know in the comments below, and tweet us @ViewtheVibe.