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Rare wines from Vega Sicilia, Spain’s most renowned wine estate, will be presented for tasting at the third annual Las Nubes Fine Wine Tasting and Auction to raise funds for research and conservation projects at York University’s Las Nubes Rainforest in Costa Rica.
The event will be held today at 6pm, at the Vaughan Estate on the grounds of Sunnybrook & Women’s College Health Sciences Centre, Sunnybrook Campus, 2075 Bayview Ave., Toronto.
This year’s event will offer collectors a tasting of seven wines including Vega Sicilia Unico 1991, 1989 and 1987. Vega Sicilia is indisputably one of the great wine estates of Spain, and Unico is one of the world’s top red wines. Unico is Spain’s most expensive, most exotic, most venerable and most mysterious red wine. It is proclaimed by many to be the equivalent of Chateau Latour.
The Las Nubes auction is hosted by the Woody Fisher Fund for Neotropical Conservation at York. Research at Las Nubes is conducted by the faculty and graduate students of York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Their work helps to maintain the biodiversity of forest habitats and coffee agroecosystems that are essential to the survival of migratory songbirds, many of which summer in Canada. It has also helped to raise public awareness about the value of shade-grown, organic coffee as an ecologically sound alternative to deforestation of critical ecosystems in Latin America.
The Woody Fisher Fund and Las Nubes
The Woody Fisher Fund for Neotropical Conservation was created when Dr. M.M. "Woody" Fisher (right) donated the Las Nubes rainforest to York University in 1998. This fund has helped support the field research of FES graduate students at the project site in southern Costa Rica.
Las Nubes, the one-time threatened, montane cloud forest adjacent to Chirripó National Park and the Amistad Biosphere Reserve, is now part of the largest, undisturbed rainforest in Central America. The research at Las Nubes conducted by FES faculty and graduate students has also been supported by the Canadian International Development Agency and the International Development Research Centre.
This research is helping to maintain the biodiversity of forest habitats that are essential to the survival of many migratory songbirds that summer in Canada. It is also helping to raise public awareness about the value of shade-grown, organic coffee as an ecologically sound alternative to deforestation of critical ecosystems in Latin America.
See the March 12, 2003, issue of YFile for an article on last year’s gala fine wine tasting and auction event.
Below: Photo from the Las Nubes region
