Welcome to BC Wine 101, where I will focus in on a different wine region in each episode for anyone who is interested in learning about BC wine, including the wine bloggers who will be traveling to Penticton for the Wine Bloggers Conference coming up in June.

You can listen online here or download our podcast on iTunes.

Summerland is a great little town. I say that not because I grew up there (I didn’t), but I did live there for a short time when I first relocated to the Okanagan Valley. There’s an energy here that isn’t like other towns in the valley. The landscape around Summerland is extremely dynamic. There are wide valleys, high mountains, lakeshores, deep canyons, and huge silt bluffs all within town limits. And the most amazing part is that the town is located inside the remains of an extinct volcano. But that’s another story.

There are a lot of wineries here and they are all very close together. You can see a lot of terrain and try a lot of wine here on a lot of different patios all with remarkably different views. Straight roads do not happen in Summerland. There are more S-curves and wineries that start with the letter “S” than anywhere else in BC.

Bottleneck Drive represents the majority of wineries in this region and have a good track record for putting on a great show as an organization. The Light Up the Vines festival held each year in November really gets the holidays started with a series of tours through the participating wineries. (Check out Podcasts 94 and 95 for interviews from the 2011 edition.)

I’ve always enjoyed my visits to wineries in Summerland and have made the wineries here destinations for over 10 years now. Even living in the south Okanagan as I do, I always enjoy making special trip to Summerland just to visit a particular winery or to track down a particular bottle of wine. It all happens there.

The wineries of Bottleneck Drive:

Other wineries in Summerland: