Developer seeks new site for Oliver Wine Village project

OLIVER, BC—Bellstar Developments Inc. has cancelled plans to buy the 3.6-acre Centennial RV park in downtown Oliver for the Oliver Wine Village, after running into opposition from town residents.

Bellstar had intended to pay the town $1 million for the riverfront property to develop a wine-themed resort with a hotel, condominiums, a wine interpretive centre, restaurants and artists’ studios.

Local business people backed the planned re-development of the riverfront property.

However, 71-year-old Fay Bruneau, who lives in a recreational vehicle in the RV park with her husband, collected 1,100 names on a petition opposing the transformation of the site. Bellstar Development, an affiliate of Calgary-based Bellstar Hotels & Resorts Ltd., did its own survey of Oliver residents and found that the majority of respondents wanted the wine village, but not on the chosen site.

The company maintains that it is still interested in developing such a project, even after its original partner in the project, Co-operators Development Corporation Ltd., pulled out.

Executive vice-president Jon Zwickel said in a release last month, “We have no doubt that a destination resort themed around wine and culinary arts is appropriate for Oliver and region… ideally, we would locate the resort on a site that the community can embrace and support, as well as a site that will allow us to create the resort in phases, something the original site does not allow us to do.

“Our next step is to locate an alternate site for the resort, preferably a site with an Oliver address,” he added.

Oliver business leaders refer to the town as the “wine capital of Canada.”

Bellstar referred in its release to “the $2-billion culinary agri-tourism industry within British Columbia.”

The southern Okanagan has seen a lot of wine tourism development in recent years.

Rezoning was recently approved for a new project, a 20-unit Greata Ranch Wine Lodge attached to the CedarCreek Estate Winery in Kelowna.

This is in addition to another CedarCreek venture being carried out in partnership with Vancouver-based developer Concord Pacific Group. Greata Ranch Vineyard Estates is a planned development of 350 luxury condos and villas on 40 acres overlooking Okanagan Lake, between Peachland and Summerland. It will be surrounded by 40 acres of vines and have a 20-room wine lodge, a winery and a restaurant.