From its lofty position atop Mount Boucherie, Mission Hill Family Estate Winery has been commanding attention since it was founded more than 40 years ago. However, its more than just a pretty face. Since those early days, the winery has collected dozens of global awards and accolades for its many wines, and despite a recent cold snap and the impacts of climate change, the team has no plans of slowing down any time soon.
“We have made some very good wines, but we haven’t made the best that we can make,” said Taylor Whelan, Mission Hill’s chief winemaker. “We are continually reinvesting to create something better than ever before.”
Mission Hill was founded by Anthony von Mandl, an entrepreneur who self-financed his Okanagan winemaking dream by creating several brands that transformed the global drinks industry, including Mike’s Hard Lemonade and White Claw Hard Seltzer. Born in Vancouver, B.C., von Mandl grew up in Europe, but had a vision for what the Okanagan Valley could become. Working as a wine seller in Vancouver, he risked everything to buy a near-bankrupt winery – one of only five wineries in the Okanagan at the time – and then oversaw its multimillion-dollar renovation in 1996.
While the outstanding architecture may have made the initial headlines, shortly after that the wines began gaining attention, too. Under the guidance of winemaker John Simes, who joined the team in 1992, Mission Hill began collecting international awards for its wines, a vast portfolio of reds, whites, rosés and sparkling wines.
With breathtaking views of vineyards and Okanagan Lake, the winery features an outdoor amphitheatre, an underground barrel cellar blasted into volcanic rock, a seasonal outdoor restaurant, a tasting room and a wine boutique. A 12-storey bell tower stands high on the estate, with four bronze bells made by France’s Paccard Bell Foundry. Canada’s only five-time winner of WineAlign’s Winery of the Year, Mission Hill has also received myriad other accolades, including the World’s Best Pinot Noir at the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2013 and 2017.
The winery grew a range of grapes, including Riesling, Chardonnay, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet Franc.
The flagship Mission Hill wine is Oculus, a Bordeaux-style red blend (Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, with a hint of Petit Verdot) that was first made in 1997 and is part of the winery’s Icon Collection. The 2020 vintage received the first-ever perfect 100-point score for a Canadian red table wine last year from Canadian wine writer John Schreiner.
The Icon Collection is made from the top one per cent of the winery’s estate-grown grapes, and all the fruit is hand-harvested and sorted. Both the Icon Collection and Oculus receive extended barrel aging and spend two years in bottle before release. Next on the list is the Terroir Collection, which features the top three per cent of fruit chosen from specific vineyard blocks. The Reserve Collection wines are made from hand-selected vineyard blocks; depending on the wine, they may spend more time in barrel for added texture and complexity.
Select Mission Hill wines are sold across Canada, a few southern U.S. states, the U.K., Switzerland and, soon, Denmark. The team is also exploring distribution to new global markets, including other Scandinavian countries and Japan.
Born and raised on Canada’s West Coast, Whelan never imagined he’d one day become a winemaker. His parents owned sporting goods stores in B.C. and Whelan studied biology at university, thinking he wanted to be a marine biologist. “I did become one for a few years, but an entry-level marine biologist job isn’t seeing whales. It’s sitting in front of a computer,” he said. “I didn’t like it very much.” So, he quit and became a winemaker instead. He hasn’t looked back. After stints in Niagara-on-the-Lake, New Zealand and Australia, he returned to B.C. in 2011, joining CedarCreek Estate Winery.
The von Mandl family assumed ownership of CedarCreek in 2014, and Whelan stayed on, moving to Mission Hill two years ago. Senior estate manager Charlie Drummond handles hospitality, restaurant operations and the front of house, while Whelan manages a team of 15 or so employees who work in the cellars and the laboratory, and help with bottling and the hands-on side of winemaking.
It’s about that one perfect wine you have in your head. And now we have to figure out how to make it.
Taylor Whelan, Mission Hill Family Estate Winery
In January 2024, the Okanagan Valley was hit with unprecedented cold weather and Mission Hill, like most of the region’s wineries, lost a considerable number of vines.
Typically, the team sources grapes from five sub-regions across the Okanagan: Fritzi’s Vineyard, Naramata Ranch Vineyard, Jagged Rock Vineyard, Border Vista Vineyard and Reed Creek Vineyard. After the severe cold, however, Mission Hill had to pivot to keep wines on the shelves and in customers’ cellars. While many colleagues turned to Washington in the U.S. to buy grapes, Whelan and Mission Hill went a little further, calling on friends and colleagues in New Zealand to source replacement fruit.
They then had around 50 different raw wines shipped from New Zealand, which they tasted and chose from to blend, finish and bottle on-site in the Okanagan. “It was a fun process and I’m proud of the wines,” said Whelan. “In particular, we’re having a lot of success with our 2024 Reserve Sauvignon Blanc, which is a Marlborough blend.”
Luckily, there’s good news to report on the home front this year. “We’ve had a beautiful growing season so far and the vines are coming back,” Whelan said. “We’re going to get a harvest this year, which is great.”
Technology is a big part of managing the valley’s changing climate. “We’re really on the cusp of a [technological] revolution in winemaking. A winemaker’s time is valuable, but typically a lot of time is spent doing low-value work: processing data, writing work orders,” said Whelan. That’s why he and his team are setting up pilot projects that automate many of those tasks.
For instance, they have instruments inside their tanks that take readings and then send the data straight to their computers. “It’s in situ analysis, rather than lab analysis,” he said. “It takes a while to set up at first, but then you just open your computer and have all the data on your screen.” They have had an optical sorting system in the winery for a few years now and the cellar is paperless; the team uses tablets to enter data so it can be seen by everyone who needs it, quickly and effortlessly.
The team conducts cold weather mapping to figure out where to place wind machines, and instead of mass irrigation, they’re using special probes to measure exactly what the vines need. Drones monitor vine health from the air, while on the ground, a Geier machine allows them to farm precisely with minimal soil impact.
The 2020 vintage received the first-ever perfect 100-point score for a Canadian red table wine last year from Canadian wine writer John Schreiner.
In the cellar, they have concrete eggs, clay amphorae and oak barrels. They also use an automated pump-over setup that allows the winery to have “many small ferments without a huge number of people to manage them,” according to Whelan. “It’s about getting much finer detail that will trickle right through the winemaking process,” he said. A herd of Scottish Highland cattle spend time between CedarCreek and Mission Hill, adding natural fertilizer and helping to aerate the soil.
While Whelan and his team have relied on machine harvesting in the past, these days, they are mostly hand-picking their grapes. “The idea is premiumization, and that goes hand-in-hand with hand-picking,” Whelan said. “We just don’t get the same quality with mechanization that we do with our team of vineyard workers.”
Down the road, they will expand their focus on heat and water management in summer. “It’s undeniable that the valley is getting hotter and drier,” he said.
A typical day at the winery? Well, there isn’t one, Whelan says, but he is an early bird, starting each workday around six-in-the-morning, six days a week during the harvesting season. “I typically taste all the ferments first thing in the morning and then come up with a plan,” he said. “How many times do we need to do pump-overs? Are the fermentations on track? Then I’m planning constantly for the next few days: taste, manage ferments, figure out the next day and the day after that. Then we do another round of tasting before the end of the day, just to be sure all the decisions we made earlier don’t need to be modified.”
Three days a week, he’s in the vineyards, a highlight of his workweek. “Especially in the fall, the light is really nice,” said Whelan. “I take Chute Lake Road, which has all these larch trees and aspens that turn orange and yellow in the fall. It’s a pretty spectacular time of the year.”
So is the summer, he says, and even the staff get excited about the Summer Concert Series. Now in its 18th season, the series takes place in the winery’s outdoor amphitheatre and is a much-loved tradition in the Okanagan Valley, with visitors attending from around the world. This year’s lineup includes Blue Rodeo, Jann Arden, Andy Grammer and the Gipsy Kings. Attendees can buy tickets for individual concerts or sign up for a dinner and a show package, which includes the concert and a regionally inspired meal from the award-winning culinary team paired, of course, with Mission Hill wines.
Community involvement is important to the Mission Hill team. In addition to supporting causes such as breast cancer research in Canada, the team supports various charities throughout the province. One of the biggest is the annual Festival of Trees, which features Christmas trees throughout the winery – even the cellar – as a fundraiser in support of the BC Children’s Hospital.
As for Whelan, he’s in the cellar one day and combing through vineyards the next, aiming to make Mission Hill’s best wines yet. “It’s about that one perfect wine you have in your head,” he said. “And now we have to figure out how to make it.”
