ABSTRACT
The Okanagan Valley in the central interior of British Columbia, Canada has much in common with other new world wine regions, replete with landscape manifestations of white European settlement and mobilities driven by the agrarian rural idyll. However, it is also a place that stands out as unique in many respects, particularly in the way it has been imagined as an ecotopian landscape, an idealized ecological and cultivated rural idyll created to encourage, manipulate and drive both tourism and migration. In summarizing the geographic history of the Okanagan Valley, it is evident that ecotopian images, the nexus of nature-culture collusion in the agricultural landscapes in the region have driven settlement, tourism and the growth of the wine industry in the region for over two centuries. Applying Williams’ (2001) destination attributes as representative of the nature-culture nexus of ecotopian terroir, a content analysis of photographic images reveals that the themes of landscape, climate and environment, facility, and sense of place support transformative changes in the promotion and branding of the landscape, cultural identities, increased accessibility, and ultimately the visitation, settlement patterns and development of the region as a place of oeno-gastronomic consumption.
