Mission Hill Family Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

Converting a vineyard to organic is a decision one grower makes about one piece of land. The von Mandl group made it about forty-seven vineyards at once, strung along two hundred kilometres of the Okanagan Valley, which is close to an eighth of all the vineyard land in the region. Ecocert audited for the first time during the 2019 harvest and the certification completed in 2021.

Anthony von Mandl, who built the company, calls the stewardship non-negotiable and says the decision was never a profit one. Darryl Brooker, who runs Mission Hill, puts the payback at around ten years. In the meantime the herbicides went and the ploughs came back.

If British Columbia is not where you expect serious wine to come from, the Okanagan is worth a minute. It is a long, narrow valley in the province's dry interior with a lake down the middle that holds warmth into the autumn, and it sits far enough north that the summer days run long and the nights turn cold. Hot days and cold nights are the mechanism most cool-climate regions are built on: the sugar climbs while the acidity holds, which is what lets Bordeaux grapes ripen this far from Bordeaux without going soft.

Oculus is the bottle the estate is measured by, a red built on those Bordeaux varieties. In 2025 WineAlign made Mission Hill its Winery of the Year at the National Wine Awards of Canada, the sixth time since those awards began in 2001.

One gap here is ours rather than theirs. We have not obtained the Ecocert certificate number: Canada keeps no central operator registry and Ecocert Canada publishes separately from the provincial bodies, so there is no single register to check it against the way there is in Europe. It goes here when we have it.