Here’s a photo from the pre-digital era of 2003. Its colours look as quaint as old Life Magazine covers. It does the job, though …

Chasselas Vineyards, Vevey Switzerland

The Swiss have figured out how to make great wine where no wine should be made. The chemicals in the Fuji film are aging less well than the wine, though.

Here’s the Swiss trick: plant above Lake Geneva, so the lake radiates heat night and day; plant on a hill to catch the sun; plant with stone walls everywhere, so they catch the heat and radiate it again, to maximize the usable daylight hours, and grow one cluster of grapes per plant, so that everything the plant does goes into that single cluster of grapes. Pinot Noir, Chardonay and Riesling may be the kings of wine, but these simple, native Swiss grapes create one of the two wines most truly suitable for making cheese fondue. (Read on for the other.) Their gentle acids cut through the oils of the cheese, while their dry and close-to-raisiny fruitiness carries the cheese lightly in its hands. It is a story of light and heat — and darkness.

• The sun’s light pours through the tip of the grape plant, down into the grapes, where it is stored as malic and tartaric acid.

• Approximately 25% of the sugars in a ripe grape don’t come directly from photosynthesis, but from a metamorphosis of the fruit’s acids during the period of verraison, when the skins begin to colour up and the grapes start filling with water.

• That’s where the skins come in. They photosynthesize completely differently than the leaves and store the sunlight that strikes them as acid, much as a cactus does, and then breathe in the night and transform that acid into sugars.

• Because this process is connected to the transformations in the interior of the berry, the way in which it is supported in the vineyard determines the ultimate flavour of the wine.

In short, in Burgundy wine-making is about soil. Here, it’s all about heat. When wine makers understand that, they can make wines that are equal to the greatest, while remaining unique.

An interesting side effect of the tropical kind of photosynthesis taking place in grape skins is that grapes picked in the evening have enhanced acids over ones picked in the morning. At the beginning of fermentation, when those skins haven’t yet completely transformed their acids, the must that will become the wine has the potential to remain alive. If treated carefully, it can do its work in the dark. For it, dawn only comes when you pour it into your glass, or into a pot and add that other product of twice-digested sunlight, cheese.

Which brings me to the other great fondue wine: semillon. Not every semillon, though. Certainly not those from Australia or France. And the British Columbian semillon best suited for making fondue doesn’t come from the Okanagan at all, but from the Shuswap. These Larch Hills semillons are high altitude, cool climate, non-irrigated grapes, with more acidity than the semillons from the Okanagan, Australia, or France — enough to lift them from candidates for the blending tank or for sweet sauternes into a great food wines. Latitude and altitude are tools akin to the lake and the stone of Vevey.

Here’s the fondue:

Fondue Neuchâteloise

• 225 grams Swiss Gruyère
• 1 clove of garlic
• 225 grams Swiss Emmenthaler
• 250 ml Vevey Chasselas or Larch Hills Semillon
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1-4 ounces Kirsch
• Freshly ground pepper to taste

Grate the cheese. Toss with the flour. Set aside. Peel and halve the garlic, grease the walls of a large, heavy pot with the halves, then leave in the pot. Place the pot on medium heat and add the wine. Once it has started to bubble lightly, start adding the grated cheese, stirring occasionally. Once the sauce is smooth (about 5 minutes), add the kirsch and pepper to taste. Serve in a heavy pot over a flame, with a home-made baquette baked to have a dense, nutty crust and cut into cubes, a dipping fork for all, and an orange-carrot salad on the side. As for the kirsch, don’t fool around with your local liquor store. If it can’t get you Schladerer from Stauffen in the Upper Rhine, just go to Okanagan Spirits. They can help you with elegance and verve. And don’t use anything but the best Swiss cheese you can get. If it doesn’t have that little red and white flag, it doesn’t know how to talk to the wine. Oh, and here’s the salad:

Orange Carrot Salad

• 4 navel oranges
• 3 medium carrots
• 1 Tbsp light honey (pass on the buckwheat and blueberry honeys.)
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon (or to taste)
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice (or to taste)
• 1 Tbsp light, fresh salad oil

Peel oranges with a sharp knife, removing white membrane as you go. Dice the oranges, and put into a bowl along with the honey, lemon juice, cinnamon, and oil. Set aside. Peel the carrots, and cut into 3 inch strips, 1/8 inch wide. Toss with the orange mixture. To have fun with your guests, cut the carrots into 6 inch strips. Turn your meal into a fun little can-you-fit-it-on-the-fork game. If you really have lots of time, peel each orange segment separately to eliminate all white membrane, then dice. Whew. The danger is that you’ll finish your whole bottle of semillon before you get that far, and will have to negotiate the tricky thing with a sharp knife and all those fingers. Your call.

And above all, remember this: if the people who made this wine and this cheese for you had not thought all along of the light and the heat, and aimed to recreate that and keep it alive in the bottle (as impossible as it sounds), they would have made thin, watery wines, or muddy fruity wines, like many of the newer offerings from the Okanagan and Washington. It seems that what you put into wine you get out again. If you put in light, you get light. If you put in juice, you get juice. Remember as well: those juicy wines are finished when they’re bottled; that wine of Vevey or Salmon Arm is finished only when it touches your tongue.

Effectively, you speak it just at the moment at which it speaks to you.

I hope the vintners of the Okanagan rise to the challenge soon.