When owner Rick Thrussell purchased an abandoned peach, apricot, and plum orchard in 2006, he envisioned an organic vineyard. Within the next year, vines were imported from France and planted, marking the beginning of Sage Hills Estate Winery. Since day one, Rick and his wife Toby have been dedicated to organic viticulture by championing the preservation of surrounding habitats, and supporting the biodiversity of the land.

If you’ve visited us before you’ve likely noticed our bee friendly wildflowers such as the lavender and catnip, or our large vegetable garden which feeds our family. Toby Thrussell is our resident green thumb and her attentive gardening truly makes Sage Hills feel like a home away from home. You can hear more about Rick and Toby’s origin stories first hand in the tasting room, and experience their thoughtful design influence throughout the property.

Keenan Thrussell, Rick’s youngest son, is head of our production and grew up working these vines. His goal since taking over as head winemaker in 2017 was to have our beautiful vineyards reflected purely within our wines. Inspired by thousands of years of winemaking across the world, Keenan is helping to define the Canadian natural wine scene, by producing organic wine that is not only reflective of each growing season, but expressive of the Okanagan Valley's unique terroir. Working as both the grape grower and winemaker, Keenan has the opportunity to create balanced wines by focusing on the balance within our vineyards. We’re now striving to make the best organic wine, in the most natural way possible.

Our vineyard temperatures are moderated by Okanagan Lake, which provides relief from summer heat, and warmth during the winter months. Large day to night temperature shifts and south east facing slopes encourage slow ripening conditions, leading to acid retention and pronounced aromatic intensity from our fruit. Our soils are predominantly silty, with carbonate lime-rich deposits which are free draining, yet water retentive, allowing our vines to root deeply in search of nutrients and water, requiring only minimal drip irrigation during the growing season. Our organic certification require our viticultural practices omit the use of synthetic chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or synthetic fertilizers. Instead, we use compost and plant based products, such as kelp for vine nutrition and mineral based sulphur sprays to reduce mildew pressures in the vineyard. Our estate vineyards farm Pinot Noir, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Gris varietals, with organic grape purchases of Syrah, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon from southern Oliver rounding out our offerings.

Although our winemaking started out in a more conventional manner, we are now committed to producing vibrant natural wine from 2019 onward. Each year, we grow - developing our skills to adapt to vintage conditions, and maintaining minimal interventions to our winemaking. Our Pét-Nat sparkling wines, organic white wines, organic red wines, and organic skin contact wines are fermented using only the wild yeast naturally present on the skins of the grapes. Our organic winery uses stainless steel, and French oak barrels as fermentation and maturation vessels. The cloudiness of our wines indicate that we are no longer fining or filtering. We are instead relying on healthy fruit and natural preservatives to stabilize our wines. This is all in an effort to bring you the most naturally terroir driven expressions possible from our Okanagan Vineyard. In a further effort towards sustainability in the winery, we run completely off of solar energy in both our cellar and tasting room. We are the first small- net zero winery in the Okanagan Valley region, producing more energy than we consume. We are also lowering our carbon footprint by using light weight glass bottles (as of 2020) for all our wines.

We believe natural wine should be made from organically farmed vines (at the very least), and produced without any additions or filtering. Some call this zero-zero, we have chosen to label “nothing added, nothing removed” as an indication of these minimal interventions. Should we ever need to employ sulphur in our winemaking, we will always label this information on our bottles as we believe in full transparency of our production practices.

In our tasting room, we offer wine tastings of our organic wines with stunning views of our surrounding vineyards and of Okanagan Lake. If you’re looking for somewhere to taste wine outdoors, join us on our new patio. Here you will find our wines by the glass or bottle, alongside snacks to compliment. Immerse yourself into our world, and explore organic natural wines from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.