Emily Faulconer Brings Chile's Finest to the Okanagan

Who Is Emily Faulconer, Iconic Wineries of British Columbia's New VP and Technical Director?

Emily Faulconer arrives in British Columbia with a formation that is unusual even by the standards of Chile's most competitive wine corridor.

She holds a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Engineering, Viticulture and Oenology from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, one of Latin America's most rigorous viticulture programs, alongside a Winemaker Certification from the Asociación Nacional de Ingenieros Agrónomos de Chile.

Her third credential is the one that sets her apart from most winemakers: a Diploma in Energy Efficiency Project Management from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María. In a wine world increasingly shaped by climate pressure and sustainability imperatives, that technical fluency in energy systems is not a footnote, it is a working tool.

In her new role, Faulconer oversees winemaking and viticulture across the full Iconic Wineries of British Columbia portfolio: Mission Hill Family Estate, CheckMate Artisanal Winery, Martin's Lane Winery, CedarCreek Estate Winery, Red Barn at Jagged Rock, Road 13 Vineyards, and Liquidity Wines. Seven estates, each with its own identity, appellation focus, and production philosophy. The scope of the mandate is broad, and the choice of someone with Faulconer's specific background to lead it tells you something about where Managing Director Michael Alter wants to take the group.

Alter put it plainly in the announcement: her technical leadership, he said, will "strengthen our foundations, advance precision across our winemaking and viticulture, and elevate the quality and expression of our wines across our family of Okanagan Valley maisons." The word maisons, borrowed from Champagne's vocabulary for heritage houses, is a deliberate register. This is a group positioning itself in the language of European fine wine, and it has just hired the person it believes can close the gap between aspiration and bottle.

A Résumé Built on Chile's Most Prestigious Estates

That last detail matters as much as the winemaking credential. Representing icon-tier wines in global markets means sitting across the table from the world's most demanding sommeliers, collectors, and trade buyers, in London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong.

It means defending vintage decisions, explaining stylistic choices, and building the kind of long-term relationships that translate into cellar allocations and restaurant list placements. Faulconer did not just make those wines; she carried them into the rooms where reputations are built.

That market fluency, knowing how to position a wine in a conversation where Burgundy and Bordeaux set the reference points, is now pointed at the Okanagan.

The Chilean Parallel: What Emerging Regions Learn from Seña's Rise

Chile's move from bulk-wine exporter to source of genuinely collectible bottles did not happen by accident. It required a generation of technically trained winemakers willing to interrogate their own terroir, to ask not just what the land could grow, but what it could say. Estates like Seña were central to that shift: they set a quality ceiling that pulled the entire appellation upward, gave international buyers a reference point, and created the credibility that allowed smaller producers to find export markets they could not have accessed alone.

The timing aligns with a broader push. Mission Hill Family Estate, Martin's Lane Winery, and CheckMate Artisanal Winery are already expanding into international markets, through Dreyfus Ashby & Co. in the United States, Goedhuis Waddesdon in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, Cepage in Japan, Seoul Wine & Spirits in Korea, and Wine Affairs in Sweden.

That is a distribution network assembled for fine-wine positioning, not volume. Dreyfus Ashby has long been associated with Burgundy and Rhône producers; Goedhuis Waddesdon is one of the UK's most respected fine-wine merchants.

The company Iconic Wineries is choosing to keep tells you the tier it is aiming for, and Faulconer's appointment is the winemaking credential that gives those partnerships something to sell.

What Faulconer's Appointment Means for the Okanagan Valley's Global Ambitions

Faulconer herself was direct about her intentions. "I'm excited to join Iconic Wineries of British Columbia in the Okanagan Valley and bring my global winemaking perspective to Canada," she said in the announcement. "I look forward to building on this legacy and contributing to the vision of placing the Okanagan Valley on the world wine stage."

The phrase "global winemaking perspective" is worth unpacking. It does not mean imposing a house style across seven different estates, that would be the opposite of what made her Chilean career instructive. It means bringing the analytical rigour and market fluency she developed across Maipo, Aconcagua, Colchagua, and the Aconcagua Coast to bear on a new set of soils, a new climate, and a new set of varietals. It means knowing which questions to ask of a vineyard before you decide how to answer them in the cellar.

For collectors and wine travelers, the practical implication is straightforward: the wines coming out of Mission Hill Family Estate, CheckMate Artisanal Winery, Martin's Lane Winery, CedarCreek Estate Winery, Red Barn at Jagged Rock, Road 13 Vineyards, and Liquidity Wines over the next several vintages will be shaped by someone who spent years making wines that sit on the lists of the world's most discerning buyers.

Whether that translates into a tightening of the CheckMate Chardonnay's barrel program, a shift in picking dates at Martin's Lane, or a new approach to viticulture across the South Okanagan's heat-stressed blocks, those decisions are now in Faulconer's hands.

The international distribution infrastructure is already in place across five markets on three continents. What changes now is the winemaking leadership behind the bottles moving through it.

Seven Estates, One Vision

The breadth of the Iconic Wineries portfolio is worth sitting with for a moment. Mission Hill Family Estate, perched above the west bank of Okanagan Lake, has long been the group's flagship, a winery whose architecture and ambition announced, from its opening, that the Okanagan was not playing a regional game.

CheckMate Artisanal Winery focuses exclusively on Chardonnay and Merlot, a narrow brief that demands precision over volume. Martin's Lane, in the Naramata Bench and Kelowna areas, has built a reputation around single-vineyard Riesling and Pinot Noir.

CedarCreek Estate Winery, one of the Okanagan's older established names, brings a different heritage and a different set of vineyard relationships. Road 13 Vineyards and Red Barn at Jagged Rock anchor the Golden Mile Bench and the South Okanagan, respectively. Liquidity Wines, in Okanagan Falls, adds a culinary-focused dimension to the group.

Each of these estates has its own winemaking identity, its own vineyard team, its own relationship with the land. Faulconer's mandate is not to homogenize them, it is to raise the technical floor across all seven while preserving what makes each one distinct. That is a more nuanced brief than it might appear, and it is the kind of brief that rewards exactly the career she has had: moving between estates with different terroirs, different varietals, and different market positions, and finding the specific lever that lifts each one.

A Career Credential That Travels

One of the less-discussed aspects of Faulconer's background is her Diploma in Energy Efficiency Project Management. In the context of a winemaking appointment, it might seem peripheral.

In the context of the Okanagan Valley, a region where wildfire smoke, heat spikes, and water allocation are active concerns for every vintage, it reads as a working qualification.

The ability to design and manage energy systems at a production scale, applied across seven estates with different infrastructure profiles, is the kind of cross-disciplinary competence that rarely appears on a winemaker's CV. It suggests someone who thinks about the winery as a system, not just a series of fermentation decisions.

That systems thinking, combined with the market intelligence she built representing Familia Chadwick's icon wines internationally, and the terroir literacy she developed across Chile's most varied appellations, makes Faulconer a genuinely unusual appointment. The Okanagan Valley has had talented winemakers. It has had technically rigorous winemakers. It has had winemakers who understood the export market. Faulconer arrives with all three in the same CV, and with the specific experience of having done it at the icon tier, where the margin for error is smallest and the scrutiny is highest.

Watch the next two or three vintages from Mission Hill, CheckMate, and Martin's Lane with particular attention, these are the three estates already moving through Dreyfus Ashby and Goedhuis Waddesdon, the merchants whose buyers will form the first international verdict on what Faulconer's tenure produces. The distribution is in place. The winemaking leadership has arrived. What comes next is the wine itself.