Scene setters The best photos from Free Press photojournalists in 2024 Posted: 12:00 PM CST Friday, Dec. 27, 2024 Last Modified: 3:51 PM CST Friday, Dec. 27, 2024 Updates

Gallery: The best photos from Free Press photojournalists in 2024

It feels like 2024 has flown by far too quickly. Understandably, some might feel this year didn’t go by fast enough. Regardless of how one might feel about 2024, our staff photographers were around the city and province to capture some of the best and compelling images of this year.

Hellebuyck standoff caused by… Nathan MacKinnon?

Looking for someone to blame in the Connor Hellebuyck fiasco and cast as public enemy No. 1? How about long-time Winnipeg Jets nemesis Nathan MacKinnon?

Allow us to explain as we fire up the time machine and head back to February in Italy.

Oh, what could have been if MacKinnon had been able to score on what appeared to be an open net late in the third period of the men’s gold medal game with Hellebuyck down and seemingly out of position.

Instead, the star forward fired wide, keeping the score deadlocked at 1-1 as the clock ticked down on regulation.

Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

It’s not every day you encounter a seriously intended literary novel that attempts to dramatize a mind-bending physics theory like quantum entanglement.

But then the B.C.-born-and-raised Emily St. John Mandel is not your everyday Canadian literary writer.

In her late 40s, she has lived in the U.S. for her entire writing career. She is best known for her 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, about a Shakespearean acting troupe navigating a pandemic-ravaged America.

Her new outing, her seventh, Exit Party, shares DNA with detective and sci-fi genres more than with conventional literary fiction.

Cabernet Sauvignon star of wine festival

The Winnipeg Wine Festival will celebrate the king of red wine grapes next weekend — the theme of this year’s festival, which takes place Sept. 25 and 26 at the RBC Convention Centre, is Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cab Sauv, as it’s also known, is the world’s most widely planted wine grape of any colour, first coming to prominence in the 1800s in France’s Bordeaux region, where the grape is still popular. Rather than single-variety wines, Bordeaux reds tend to be blends, with those coming from the left bank of the Gironde estuary being Cabernet-dominant, while right-bank wines are Merlot-dominant, with Cabernet Sauvignon playing a supporting role. Cabernet and Merlot work well together and many other countries have followed suit in blending the two.

A team at University of California Davis put Cabernet Sauvignon through a DNA test in 1996 and discovered its parent grapes are Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc — it’s likely that at some point the two varieties, planted next to each other in some vineyard, crossed and mutated and became the grape we know today. (Someone growing grapes in the 19th century must have had an inkling of what was up, as the grape has been called Cabernet Sauvignon since long before the DNA test.)

Flavour-wise, most Cabernet Sauvignon wines are big and bold, with a core of deep dark berry flavours, some graphite and spice notes and relatively bright acidity. It’s a grape that is well-suited to barrel aging, with most examples seeing at least some time in wood.