Nk'Mip Cellars, North America's First Aboriginal-Owned Winery

There has seldom been a more successful  winery debut in the Okanagan than that of Nk'Mip Cellars, North America's first aboriginal-owned winery which opened in 2002.

Consider the awards that the winery has won just in the eight months: eight medals at the Okanagan Wine Festival; seven medals in the Canadian Wine Awards; three in the All-Canadian Wine Awards. All of that was capped when the winery receiving two awards at the recent British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's Awards of Excellence.

That is not bad for a winery that emerged from a failed casino bid by the Osoyoos Indian Band of Oliver.

The 370-member band operates nine other businesses including Inkameep Vineyards. Established in 1968, this was the band's first commercial venture in modern times. Now 270 acres in size, it was the earliest large planting of vinifera grapes in the south Okanagan. The winery today is able to make award-winning wines because it gets some of the best grapes grown on the band's well-managed vineyard.

In the early 1990s, the British Columbia government issued a tender call for casinos in the south Okanagan. The band responded with a proposal for a luxury resort, including a casino, at the edge of Osoyoos. The band has 32,000 acres in its reserve and part of it, then undeveloped, included a hillside on the eastern shore of Osoyoos Lake. To the band's dismay, its tender was rejected.

The entrepreneurial band and its advisors went back to the drawing board, coming up with a winery to anchor the planned resort. The result was Nk'Mip Cellars. The resort is now under development.

The winery project has been executed very well. Robert Mackenzie of Penticton, the Okanagan's leading winery architect, was retained to design an attractive Santa Fe-styled destination winery. Technical and marketing expertise was nailed down when the band enlisted Vincor International Inc. as the winery's 49% managing partner.

Vincor has a unique relationship with the band. It leases about 900 acres of land from the band for extensive vineyards that have been planted since 1997. It also leases from the band the site for its Jackson-Triggs winery north of Oliver, where many band members are employed.

Bruce Nicholson, the award-winning winemaker at Jackson-Triggs, made the wine for Nk'Mip Cellars in 2000 and 2001. His sure touch got the winery launched with solid wines.

In the summer of 2002, Nk'Mip recruited Randy Picton as its own winemaker. Born in Saskatchewan in 1958, Picton previously kicked around in a variety of jobs, including running a motel and planting trees. In 1995, he took a winery assistant course at Okanagan University College.

The following year, he went to work at CedarCreek, where he rose from cellar hand. Recognizing Picton's raw talent, winemaker Tom DiBello had by 2001 turned over the winemaking on several varieties entirely to his assistant.

Picton has come into his own at Nk'Mip where he has a well-equipped and well-designed winery at his finger tips. And the band takes so much pride in its winery that, when Picton asks for special treatment on the grapes being grown for him, he gets it. For example, some of the rows in the Inkameep vineyard run east and west.  As a consequence, the grapes on the south side of each row generally ripen earlier than those on the somewhat shaded north side. The vineyard accommodated him when Picton asked to have the north side grapes picked later. "Not many growers will do that for you," he says.

Since good wine starts in the vineyard, Inkameep's cooperation with the winemaker's needs has given Picton an important advantage that is showing up in the winery's awards. The quality of the grapes in several superb vintages also has allowed Picton to make both regular and premium quality wines very early in the winery's history. (Tinhorn Creek waited 10 years before releasing its first reserve wine, for example.) The premium wines generally sell for more than $25 a bottle and the regular for less.

Since the term "reserve" would have been ambiguous, Nk'Mip Cellars dipped into the native language still spoken by band elders and found QWAM  QWMT as the designation for its premium wines. The term, pronounced kw-em kw-empt, means achieving excellence.

Nk'Mip Cellars has won awards with both ranges of wines. In this fall's Okanagan Wine Festival, as an example, the winery won two gold medals - for a 2003 Pinot Blanc and for a 2002 QWAM  QWMT Merlot. The latter wine and the winery's 2002 QWAM  QWMT Meritage red received awards of excellence from the Lieutenant Governor.

The winery's 2002 Pinot Noir won a gold medal in the under $25 class at the All-Canada competition, a silver at the Canadian Wine Awards and a silver in the Okanagan. Other prize winning wines from Nk'Mip include its 2002 Chardonnay, its 2003 QWAM  QWMT Chardonnay, its 2003 Riesling, its regular 2002 Merlot and its 2003 Riesling Icewine.

In fact, there is no wine in the Nk'Mip portfolio that has not won an award this year one major competition or another. There is only one word for that performance: impressive.