Go to the website of Iconic Wineries of British Columbia and you are met with a single page and a dramatic photo. Without naming the Okanagan Valley, it announces “ONE OF THE WORLD’S LAST GREAT undiscovered WINE REGIONS. 50 million years in the making. Volcanic in origin and shaped over millennia by glacial activity.  It is a landscape defined by contrast, home to one of the highest concentrations of diverse terroir in the winemaking world”.  

From there you click on one of seven winery logos that take you the individual winery websites.  The wineries have been assembled under the Iconic Wineries of British Columbia umbrella by one owner, Anthony von Mandl.  

The seven, with the year they joined the club are, in sequence: Mission Hill Family Estate (built 1981), CedarCreek (purchased 2013), Martins Lane (built 2016), Road 13 (purchased 2018), Liquidity (purchased 2020), Checkmate (built 2020) and Red Barn (built 2023).  Together they produce about 110 different VQA, Okanagan-grown wines each vintage, drawn from almost 1,500 acres of vineyard. I counted and reckoned, but may not be 100% accurate. The scale is what’s important. 

IWBC forms an impressive body of work. My intent here is not to break them all down in terms of explaining the what, where and who of each property. But I do want to explain, from my perspective as wine taster and critic, and proponent of Canadian wine excellence, why this group is important, and also provide a bit historical context. 

The story has been oft told that Anthony Mandl started his career as a penniless wine salesman in Vancouver in the 1970s. But he seems a rather shy man, who I have met twice, and not a huckster type. What propelled him to become a self-made billionaire and one of Canada’s wealthiest men is not salesmanship but reading the room and developing and expertly marketing the products with which people are comfortable and can enjoy, with consistency. He started with the world’s first flavoured ciders, then Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and has continued into White Claw in this generation. 

These hugely successful ready-to-drink brands are the financial underpinning of his beverage alcohol empire, but Okanagan wine is clearly his personal pride and aspiration. His passion for the place is revealed in an obscure detail that he participated in a feasibility study about Okanagan viticulture in the 1970s, and has since spent a lifetime bringing the Okanagan’s potential to fruition. 

He has invested hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, over fifty years, not only in the grandeur of his Mission Hill Family Estate winery shown above, but in vineyards and wineries that are expanding the reputation of B.C. wine as a whole. Along the way he has schooled hundreds of people in viticulture, winemaking, marketing and hospitality. 

He seems to have grasped every fricking detail and discipline about what it takes to deliver quality from the ground up. He has essentially mapped the Okanagan, assembling a viticultural empire of at least 32 sites throughout the Valley, from top to bottom, Kelowna to Osoyoos. They are now all organically farmed, and each is being studied and parsed block by block. Many of the more expensive wines in the Iconic Wineries portfolio are single vineyard labels, some of which we look at in the reviews that follow. 

My lens is as a taster, and assessor of quality. And for years von Mandl’s wines have been honest benchmarks of consistently, confidence and correctness, within all the price/quality tiers. Mission Hill has won Winery of the Year six times at the WineAlign National Wine of Awards of Canada, where technical proficiency matters a lot. It allows fulsome expression of grape variety and location. 

There is never anything weird or unexpected about the wines, speaking to an understanding and control of every step of production.  Natural wine enthusiasts will criticize this approach as too technical, lacking diversity and surprise. Point taken, but when you are a leading presence its important to give folks purity and clarity.  Those looking for more off-the-wall wines can go elsewhere, or to the new seventh Red Barn Winery on the Black Sage Bench – formerly a garage for vineyard equipment now floor to ceiling with concrete tanks. 

So here is the sampler of a handful of premium wines in the portfolio – nine in all. The Tasting Notes and Backgrounders will take you deeper into each winery’s story. Most are available for direct on-line purchase from the wineries, some are only available to wine club members. All wineries ship across Canada, with shipping fees dependent on distance, but shipping fees are waived for members. Enjoy