Osoyoos in Canada welcomes more than 300,000 tourists each year, not bad for a town with only ~5,500 residents. There are likely many reasons Canadians like to visit there, with its desert-like climate and beautiful Osoyoos Lake being major draws. Another is all its wineries.
There are dozens of wineries in Osoyoos, not to mention breweries and distilleries. During our six days at Spirit Ridge Resort we visited four wineries and a distillery, then hit up another winery just north of Osoyoos on our way to Kamloops.
We enjoyed our experience at all of them and particularly appreciated that all but one of the locations were dog-friendly which meant Truffles could join us. Here are the 6 great wineries and distilleries we visited in Osoyoos.
Nk’Mip Cellars
We didn’t have to go far in order to visit our first winery as it’s one that was located at Spirit Ridge where we were staying. Nk’Mip Cellars is particularly notable as it’s the first indigenous-owned winery in North America.
Our wine tasting at Nk’Mip Cellars was a very reasonable $5 CAD (~$3.65 USD) per person. You get to choose four different wines that come as 1oz pours, with the proceeds going to the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre’s efforts to preserve the Okanagan language.
Your tasting is done inside, but you can then enjoy a glass of wine out in their garden overlooking the vineyard and Osoyoos Lake.
I mentioned earlier that all but one of the wineries we went to is pet-friendly; Nk’Mip Cellars is the only one that isn’t. Spirit Ridge Resort itself is though, so we just left Truffles in our villa there while going off to do the wine tasting.
La Stella Winery
We happened to be staying in Osoyoos over Mother’s Day, so on that day I drove Shae around to a few different wineries to celebrate Mutter’s Day seeing as she’s a dog mom. The first winery we visited that day was the Tuscan-styled La Stella Winery.
Although you can do a tasting inside in their tasting room, it was such a beautiful day outside that we sat on their patio out back and did ours there. It was surprisingly quiet the day we visited as we thought it would be busy considering it was Mother’s Day, so I’m not sure if tastings on the patio are available during busier periods.
La Stella has a set wine tasting menu with four or five wines you get to try (I forgot to note down exactly how many). It costs $10 CAD (~$7.30 USD) per person and we enjoyed all their wines, but not quite enough to buy a bottle to take with us.
Bordertown Vineyards & Estate Winery
Next up was Bordertown Vineyards & Estate Winery, taking its name from the fact that Osoyoos is just across the border from the US.
The winery has 18 different wines available and you can pick any five you like for your tasting. Shae and I picked five wines different from each other so that we could try each other’s, thereby sampling ten of the wines.
The bottles of wine were all priced very reasonably – $18-$35 CAD (~$13.10-$25 USD), with the majority costing $25 CAD or less. Our favorite wine from the ten we tried was their Cabernet Franc 2020, so we bought a bottle of that to go.
I also want to note how lovely our server was. This winery seems to have mixed reviews on Google, with some people mentioning that the person serving them seemed disinterested. That’s certainly not the case for all their staff though, as the woman who did our tasting was very friendly and informative.
Lakeside Cellars
Our final winery on Mother’s Day was Lakeside Cellars, so named because it’s located next to Osoyoos Lake. You can do a tasting indoors or out on their patio, but when there’s spectacular weather out there’s no question that sitting outside with these views is the best option.
Tastings cost $10 CAD (~$7.30 USD) per person and you pick five wines to try, with 13 different wines available to choose from when we visited. Your tasting fee is waived if you buy two bottles.
Same as at Bordertown, Shae and I each picked different wines to each other so that we could try a total of ten different ones. Also the same as at Bordertown, our favorite was the Cabernet Franc and we bought a bottle of that to start to enjoy on the patio at Lakeside Cellars, taking the rest back up to Spirit Ridge.
We sat there enjoying the views and listening to the live music that afternoon. We also got chatting to a group at the table next to us who were there to support the musician.
They gave us a couple of suggestions for other drinking places to visit in the area as two of them worked at them, so those are the remaining two locations on this list.
Tumbleweed Spirits
On our final night in Osoyoos we headed down to Tumbleweed Spirits. They have a wide range of spirits that they make and if you’d like to do a tasting, there are two kinds you can do. One is a whiskey tasting which includes four different whiskeys – bourbon-style, single malt, triticale (a blend of wheat and rye) and rye.
Whiskey is my drink of choice nowadays, so I was pleased that they had this as an option and so chose this tasting flight. All four of the whiskeys were very good, with the single malt being my favorite (a bit of a surprise as I normally prefer bourbon). The whiskey flight costs $20 CAD (~$14.55 USD) and the fee is waived if you buy two bottles (which we did).
The other tasting flight you can choose is a variety of spirits – vodka, gin, haskap (a blue-berried honeysuckle) moonshine, raspberry moonshine and cinnamon whiskey. This tasting is only $10 CAD (~$7.30 USD) and is complimentary when buying one bottle.
This is the tasting that Shae chose and she loved it. The two moonshines were particularly fun because you get to try them neat initially, then our server added a mix to make it more of a cocktail.
Shae isn’t ashamed to admit that she likes Fireball (a cheap cinnamon whiskey), so she particularly enjoyed the Fireweed cinnamon whiskey at Tumbleweed Spirits which was a more refined and much more flavorful version of Fireball, so much so that she bought a bottle of that to go.
Tumbleweed also serves cocktails, so once we’d finished our tastings we each ordered one of those.
There were some intriguing options on the menu. I came incredibly close to ordering a Terry’s Chocolate Orange seeing as that’s one of my favorite types of candy (I’m from England originally). However, seeing as we were in Canada, I felt like I had to try the Sticky Maple which contained their 1888 Triticale Whiskey, maple syrup and bitters with an orange garnish. I think Shae ordered the Moonshine Margarita and we both really enjoyed our cocktails.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the Sticky Maple was very sweet – delicious though!
Blasted Church Vineyards
One of the people we’d met at Lakeside Cellars was working at Tumbleweed Spirits the night we visited. One of the other people in their group works at Blasted Church Vineyards which is in Okanagan Falls, about 40 minutes north of Osoyoos. That happened to be along our route up to Kamloops, so we stopped in there for a tasting after checking out of Spirit Ridge.
Blasted Church is in a pretty setting looking out over Skaha Lake. The weather wasn’t too bad initially when we arrived, so we decided to do our tasting outside to take advantage of those views.
The weather turned pretty quickly though, with the wind picking up and it started to drizzle. We therefore moved inside to finish our tasting.
Tastings cost $10 CAD (~$7.30 USD) per person and we got to try six different pre-selected wines. Similar to Bordertown and Lakeside Cellars, we liked their Cabernet Franc the best and bought a bottle to take with us.
There’s a fun story behind the name Blasted Church. In 1929, a group from Okanagan Falls went to a deserted mining camp to dismantle an old wooden church and bring it back to their town. In order to loosen the nails, a member of the group called Harley Hatfield decided that it would be a great idea to hang four sticks of dynamite from the church rafters and set them off.
This sounds like a terrible idea, but it apparently worked! Well, for the most part. The steeple was damaged beyond repair, but they were able to dismantle the rest of the church and brought it back to Okanagan Falls. The church is still in use today and the winery is named after it.
Final Thoughts
Osoyoos was a lovely place to visit. We’d love to head back to Spirit Ridge Resort in the future so that we could visit even more wineries in the region, but we’d likely return to some of these ones too.
[…] After checking out of Spirit Ridge, we continued up to the city of Kamloops, only having a relatively short drive on this day of 3.5-4 hours. Although it wasn’t the fastest route, we drove up via Kelowna as there was a winery we wanted to visit… […]