This Okanagan Valley Winery Is the Best of Both Worlds

Of the many hundreds of wine regions around the world, few if any command as much respect as France’s Bordeaux appellation. Across the board, the wines of this hallowed region tend to fly off the shelves in quantities and at prices that on average far outstrip most competitors. Being born or marrying into one of the many successful multigenerational family wineries in the region can nearly guarantee success in the notoriously difficult industry. And yet, for some brave winemakers, an adventure trumps the comforts of home, and so they venture out into the wider wine world, where places like British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, as developed as it now is, provides the space to experiment and build something of one’s own.

Founded by life and business partners Pénélope and Dylan Roche in 2010, the Okanagan Valley’s Roche Wines is the result of the pair’s bold move to leave behind Bordeaux, where Pénélope’s family spent six generations building up Château Les Carmes Haut-Brion, an acclaimed winery in the acclaimed region. When the winery was sold in 2010, Pénélope and Dylan, who met while working a vintage in New Zealand, first looked elsewhere in France, including in Burgundy, where Dylan was trained, for their next project—but nothing seemed quite right.

It wasn’t until Pénélope and Dylan, who is himself a Vancouver native, took a couple of trips to Penticton that the two realized that the relatively untamed Okanagan Valley was the destination for their next adventure in wine. “We thought we could probably contribute something and operate in a little bit smaller of a pond than Bordeaux or elsewhere in France,” Dylan says. In 2011, they made the move permanent and began working in consulting roles to get their bearings in the radically different terroir and climate. Eventually, the Roches started buying grapes to make their own wines, with the 2013 vintage kicking off a multiyear spell of itinerant winemaking throughout the valley.

After a few years operating Roche as a virtual winery, the Roches were able to convince the banks that they could sell wine as well as they could make it, and in 2017 they opened the Naramata Bench facility that they now call home. Adjacent to the new state-of-the-art winery, the Domaine Roche vineyard was previously planted to several niche grapes, including schonberger and zweigelt, as well as household names like pinot noir and chardonnay. But with the January 2024 cold weather event that decimated the Okanagan Valley’s vineyards, the Roches, like many winemakers in the Okanagan Valley, decided to make lemonade out of lemons and replant entirely with grapes they want to work with: more pinot noir and chardonnay, as well as the increasingly popular cabernet franc.

Roche’s Tradition wines, its main line made entirely with estate or own-farmed grapes, draws on Pénélope and Dylan Roche’s experience in Bordeaux and Burgundy, with its pillars being Bordeaux blends of merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and cabernet franc, and varietal bottlings of the Burgundian staple grapes, chardonnay and pinot noir. Despite its name, which is drawn from the fact that like traditional European wineries, Pénélope and Dylan Roche are responsible for both the vineyards and the cellar, Roche’s main line of wines delicately balances the Old World with the New. The 2019 pinot noir, for example, combines boisterous red fruit flavours typical of New World wines with secondary leathery, barnyard, and vanilla notes typical of the Old.

Roche’s Artist Series wines offer drinkers accessible bottles that epitomize the house style. Each of the wines released under the label since it was launched in 2022 have featured labels designed by different Canadian artists in response to their interpretation of the wine after tasting it. The latest releases—a pinot blanc, a pinot gris, and a pinot noir rosé—maintain the Artist Series’ cooperative mantra in a second way, this time being made with grapes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley due to the reduced crop caused by the January 2024 freeze. Of the three new releases, the pinot blanc stands out not only because it is comparatively rare in the Okanagan Valley, but also because of its lithe acid backbone that carries notes of lemon pith, river stone, and underripe pear.

While they may not bear the prestigious names of the wines from the appellations where Pénélope and Dylan Roche were raised and trained, these and other wines from Roche are every bit as delicious. With its unique blend of Old World know-how and New World attitude, Roche is helping define the wine industry in the Okanagan Valley—where international flavour marks both libations and love.

Six Roche wines to try:

Artist Series Pinot Blanc 2024
Artist Series Pinot Gris 2024
Artist Series Pinot Noir Rosé 2024
Tradition Chardonnay 2022
Tradition Château 2020
Tradition Pinot Noir 2019

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