If you made a list of Canada’s best-known exports—oil, car parts, precious metals, Celine Dion—wine wouldn’t clear the top 20. But that hasn’t stopped one of the country’s increasingly renowned grape-growing regions from punching well above its weight.
The Okanagan Valley, roughly a 45-minute flight from Vancouver, may not be as recognized by wine lovers as Napa or Willamette, but its dedicated vintners are focused on changing that. And an influx of investment in the area—particularly in Kelowna, on the Okanagan Lake’s eastern shore—is turning it into a playground for wealthy oenophiles.
O’Rourke Family Estate, the newest winery in Canada’s Okanagan Valley, was built around (and inside of) the granite outcropping that gives its grapes their character.
Jon Adrian
This summer saw the grand opening of O’Rourke Family Estate, which has been more than a decade in the making. The property—producers mainly of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay—is the brainchild of Dennis O’Rourke, a gregarious proprietor whose success in construction gave him a leg up when he decided to build his own winery. “I don’t have much fun sending my money to New York, to investment bankers, and looking at it down there,” he says. “I have much more fun building something, creating something.”
