A view of the estate from above.
There are few wineries in British Columbia that have remained as steadfast to their original vision as Painted Rock Estate Winery.
We first visited the Skinners’ lakeside property overlooking Skaha Lake in 2020, when founder John Skinner spoke passionately about creating world-class Bordeaux-inspired wines from a single estate vineyard. Six years later, my return came for an entirely different reason—researching a story on helicopter wine tourism.
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Pénélope Roche.
The Okanagan wine industry has never lacked ambitious people, but few arrive with résumés quite like those of Pénélope and Dylan Roche. Before establishing Roche Wines on the Naramata Bench, Pénélope had studied viticulture and enology in Bordeaux, worked at Château d’Yquem and managed her family’s historic estate, Château Les Carmes Haut-Brion.
Dylan’s route was less traditional but equally impressive. A Vancouver native who discovered wine living in Burgundy, he studied winemaking in Beaune before working in New Zealand and several of Bordeaux’s most respected wineries.
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The view from Poplar Grove’s winery in Penticton.
Our first visit to Poplar Grove was back in 2002, when we went up to the Okanagan Valley for a weekend of winetasting with another couple. Our friends knew then proprietors, Ian and Gita Sutherland, and knew they had a guest house on the back of the property that they rented out. We arrived early and went to a local wine store to buy a bunch of bottles of Okanagan wines to try, as at that time we didn’t know a lot about the region and their wines. It was a beautiful afternoon, so we took about 6 bottles out on to the deck of the guest house along with a couple of glasses and opened them all up and started tasting.
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