Are you enjoying laying down all that cash for a bottle of Okanagan Valley wine, maybe a dry as a rattler’s belly merlot from Nk’mip winery in Osoyoos? This is North America’s first aboriginal winery, with grapes grown on old orchard land just over the edge of the reserve. It’s darned good stuff, and pulls the old fruit flavours from the tree roots thirty feet down in the fine sand.

Osoyoos Lake Looking Towards Canada’s Pocket Desert

NK’MIP winery is just before the sagebrush grasslands on the east side of the lake.

10 miles south, on the other side of the lake, merlot is going for $7.49. Yes, there it is at last the Okanogan’s first winery, located on Highway 97 in downtown Oroville. The Canadians have about 100 in the valley. It seems to be contagious. They’re the first, but they have friends. It’s possible to buy an ice wine for about half the Canadian rate here, eight miles south of Oroville, and a third of that here. How about a red ice wine? And, last, Copper Mountain vineyards is also in town. Like all things Oroville, they advertise themselves as living in the far north, while just north over the line, at the vacation town of Osoyoos, it’s the deep south. Four wineries is enough for a little tour across the good humour of geography, right?

Might be worth saying hi to the guys at the border on the way to and fro.