TORONTO, February 23, 2004 -- 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 Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 6 p.m., at the Vaughan Estate on the grounds of Sunnybrook & Women’s College Health Sciences Centre.

 

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.  It is made only in the best vintages, six or seven times a decade, and it is released only after ten years of aging. It 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 York’s Environmental Studies faculty and graduate students. 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 environmentally sensitive Las Nubes cloud forest adjacent to Chirripó National Park and the Amistad Biosphere Reserve is now part of the largest, undisturbed rainforest in Central America,” explains York professor and director of the FES research program at Las Nubes, Howard Daugherty. “Funds raised by the auction assist York University in pursuing vital research and the promotion of biological conservation and rural sustainability in this important region."

 

Toronto physician and environmentalist Woody Fisher donated the Las Nubes Rainforest to York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) five years ago.

 

-30-

 

For more information, please contact:

 

Ken Turriff

Media Relations

York University

416-736-2100, ext. 22086

kturriff@yorku.ca     

 

YU/030/04