Canada’s Okanagan Valley Is Now a Playground for Wealthy Wine Lovers

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.

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.”

With the help of architect John Taft of Backen & Backen (the firm has penned a number of West Coast wineries, as well as the Beverly Hills home of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis), O’Rourke created a sprawling campus in conversation with the landscape, centered on a massive granite outcropping that set the stage for the estate’s success. “This is the geology of the space,” Taft says. The rock “is that monolith left over from glaciation, but it is also what is in the vineyard—that rock and everything is what makes their vines struggle, which is, of course, what makes really, really intense and great fruit.”

But the property was designed to do more than just host wine tastings and tours of the vineyards. With 220,000 square feet of interior space across its various buildings, it has been designed as a full-service hospitality venue: There’s the fine-dining restaurant Row 188, as well as the more casual Granite Café. Event spaces range widely enough to host everything from small meetings in tucked-away rooms to concerts for hundreds—either in the forthcoming indoor theater and event center or in the concrete amphitheater, which offers sweeping, southern-facing views of the valley.

When all is said and done, the vast property will have up to 100 bedrooms; currently there are 23, including four plush, private suites in the Owners House. The estate has already held an event for Rolls-Royce clients, during which the marque drove its Spectre E.V. directly into the wine caves.

While O’Rourke is the latest entrepreneur betting big on the Okanagan, he isn’t the first. It’s hard to talk about the area without also mentioning Anthony von Mandl, the billionaire founder of White Claw and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. In 1981, he established Mission Hill Family Estate, one of the very first wineries in the region. The Olson Kundig–designed property has its own outdoor amphitheater—a grassy venue where the likes of Melissa Etheridge, Sarah McLachlan, and Lyle Lovett have performed—plus a boutique where you can snap up vintage Louis Vuitton and Goyard trunks. That’s not to outshine the wine, though: Mission Hill’s 2020 Oculus vintage, released in 2024, was honored as the first 100-point Canadian red wine. (Throughout the valley, there are several microclimates: The northern end, where Kelowna is located, is relatively temperate, while the southern end has much more arid weather, ideal for big, bold reds like Merlot and Cabernet.)

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Pinot Noir and Riesling snobs may prefer to hop across the lake to von Mandl’s winery that concentrates solelyon those grapes—Martin’s Lane. The stylish space, also designed by Olson Kundig, debuted in 2016, but you have to inquire online to schedule one of its rarely available tastings. The payoff? The chance to sample the winery’s bottles, produced using a unique gravity-flow system that takes advantage of the sloped landscape.

While von Mandl helped put the Okanagan on the map, there’s enough potential there that O’Rourke may not be the last to put down roots. He calls his new property a “family legacy project” that his children can carry on some 25 years down the road. By then, the Okanagan may no longer be a hidden gem.