A Cult Okanagan Valley Winery’s Exciting New Sub-brand

En Terre Wines is the head-turning new project from the Naramata Bench’s Terravista Vineyards.

Writer John Clegg

Terravista Vineyards, the cult Okanagan winery favoured by in-the-know British Columbian oenophiles, has made its name working with grapes rarely found in the region. The Spanish albariño and verdejo varieties make up its most popular varietal wines and blends, while the white Northern Rhône stalwarts—roussanne and viognier—pinch hit alongside syrah. Given its experimental pedigree, Terravista’s fans couldn’t be blamed for thinking that the winery’s next project would revolve around the indigenous grapes of Portugal’s Bairrada region or, say, Canadian takes on Chile’s most important varieties: carmenère and país. So it came as a slight but delicious surprise when En Terre Wines, Terravista’s new classic French-grape-and-sparkling-wine-focused sub-brand, was announced earlier this year.

While it was announced just recently, En Terre has been in the works for over seven years, well before its owners, husband and wife Eric and Dallas Thor, purchased Terravista in 2019. The project was started with the goal of fostering commitments to environmental sustainability in both the winery and vineyard. Appropriately, the brand’s logo is inspired by Da Vinci’s use of the golden ratio, the geometric principle of proportionality discovered by Euclid, which is evident throughout the natural world and a basis of the Vitruvian Man.

En Terre’s home vineyard, also called En Terre, is located in the Okanagan Valley’s Naramata Bench subappellation and incorporates a number of innovative energy and agricultural practices in the name of sustainability. Sheep graze the rows of vines, keeping vegetation in check without resorting to aggressive tilling or spraying herbicides. Large solar arrays line one side of the vineyard, occasionally shading some of the vines that grow adjacent to them.

A geothermal loop to heat and cool the facilities lies underneath the vineyard, and other more standard sustainability practices such as the use of electrical vehicles and manual vineyard management are also deployed.

Additional fruit for the En Terre label—cabernet franc, cinsault, and riesling—is drawn from the winery’s Storm Haven Vineyard, an Okanagan Falls property just below the monolithic peach cliff that creates its microclimate. Farmed in collaboration with Synchromesh Wines and JoieFarm Winery, Storm Haven Vineyard is a natural evolution of Terravista/En Terre’s environmental and social commitments. “It’s sort of a pillar of our philosophy of cooperation and organic methods and also taking care of the land,” Dallas Thor says.

Made by winemaker Nadine Kinvig with fruit from Storm Haven Vineyard, the 2023 riesling is described, along with all of En Terre’s wines, as “a testament to sustainability” and also neatly encapsulates the stylistic through line that joins them all. Combining ripping acidity with unctuous honey and overripe apple flavours, it is a testament to the warm microclimate they farm. The other two current releases, a cabernet franc and sparkling brut from the 2022 vintage, are similarly tightly wound, with the former, from the extra-warm Rock Oven block of Storm Haven, showing potential for medium-term aging with its stony tannins and ripe red and black fruit flavours.

En Terre is set to release a further two wines soon. And given the twists and turns that led to the first wines from this unexpected project from one of the Okanagan’s most exciting wineries, a pleasant surprise is more than likely in store.