Spotlight: Vineyard Communities: Vintage Vacation
Resort communities take root among the vines.
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ShareJune 1, 2008
Most oenophiles harbor no agricultural fantasies of waking up before dawn to dig, plant, and prune the fruit that eventually makes up the wine they so admire. But broach the idea of living alongside several acres of trussed-up grapevines, and it suddenly becomes an altogether different story."Before the 1990s, the only people who lived on vineyards were the vintners themselves," says Adam Ducker, a senior principle at Robert Charles Lesser & Co., a real estate consulting firm based in Bethesda, Maryland. But the promise of permanent stretches of open land, similar to those found in golf course communities, is beginning to change that. "For a residential project, green space is a good thing and not just because it’s environmentally correct. Buyers want it and will pay more to be near it," says Ducker, who estimates that the price can be anywhere from 50 to 100 percent higher for vineyard property.
A vineyard community can be as simple as a small patch of earth with a few ornamental grapes or as complex as a fully operational winery that offers its residents a stake in the wine sales and an opportunity to harvest the grapes or make the wine. Some vineyard communities include other draws—polo fields, golf, spas—but the focus is always on the wine enthusiast, with a range of epicurean activities that might include hosted winemaker dinners, winemaking instruction, and cooking classes.
"The common thread among such communities is that the residents all share some degree of passion for wine and wine culture," says Ducker. In the following pages, we offer a sampling of some of the top vineyard real estate opportunities to whet the appetites of everyone from the armchair vintner to the card-carrying winemaker.
The Rise Okanagan Valley, British Columbia
In 1988, Leona Snider, president and CEO of Okanagan Hills Development Corporation, purchased 735 acres of sage-covered fields in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. It was not until 2004, however, that she began transforming the land into a $1 billion wine and golf resort called the Rise. Though residents will live among the vines, they will not actually work them. "Growing grapes isn’t all that romantic," confides Snider, whose son, Jason Rannelli, oversees the vineyard planting. "The activities among the grapes, however, definitely are."
The Rise, which rests along Okanagan Lake near the Monashee
Mountains, recently added a Fred Couples–designed golf course to its list of
amenities and will soon start construction on a village center and a boutique
hotel. When complete, the community will contain some 660 residences and 550
condo-hotel units, but Snider insists that the area will remain "ruban"—a
combination of rural and urban—where orchards and farms neighbor the small city
of Vernon, which is less than two miles away.
