Glass of rose in hand, Brittany Price hops onto the orange velvet couch and swings her legs up.

Such lounging on the furniture is encouraged at Sandhill Winery in Kelowna.

After all, this orange velvet couch is in the winery's airy tasting room in front of the flowers-and-neon-lights rose wall celebrating the release of the 2020 vintage of Sandhill Rose ($20).

Spring has created buzz about Okanagan new-release pink and white wines and Sandhill is capitalizing by creating a whole month of hype around its rose debut.

"We're super-psyched," said Price, who is Sandhill's estate manager.

"Rose has become our best selling wine, so it only makes sense to build a month of experiences around it."

They are the 20-minute, $15 per person Rose Experience, the half-hour, $25 Tres Rose Experience and the 90-minute, $45 VIP Lounge Experience.

All experiences include a welcome glass of the 2020 rose, time for you and your bubble of up to six people to ham it up at the rose wall and lollipop made of rose.

The Tres experience adds a flight of two froses (frozen rose cocktails) and the VIP treatment includes time in the private lounge for your party, an additional bottle to share and charcuterie.

You have to reserve at MyWineCountry.com/BC.

If you want to geek out on the wine-speak, the Sandhill 2020 Rose is a refreshing, balanced, approachable and versatile patio sipper with aromatic hints of strawberry and watermelon with a tart red berry, white peach and pink grapefruit profile.

Yum!

Every year, the spring release of new vintage wines becomes a bigger and bigger deal.

It goes hand-in-hand with warmer weather, optimism about the future and being the first to sip brand new wines.

Whites and roses are, of course, the first out of the gate because the grapes picked to make them the fall before are quickly crushed, fermented and bottled to appear on the market in February, March, April and May as fresh and quaffable new vintages.

"Honestly, they are phenomenal," said Corrie Krehbiel, chief winemaker at Mission Hill Family Estate in West Kelowna.

"In fact, I'm going to say 2020 is one of the best vintages ever. Spring was wet and cool, but the summer was flawless with even, warm weather and no big heat spikes. And then the fall was beautiful with mild days and cool nights for ideal ripening."

This perfection has been captured in bottle with Mission Hill's first 2020 releases, Reserve Rose ($22), Reserve Sauvignon Blanc ($21) and Reserve Pinot Gris ($22).

Again, if you want some of that nerdy tasting notes prattle, the rose is strawberries and cream with uplifted plum and subtle spice, the Sauv Blanc a complex expression of lime and gooseberry and the Gris a textured apple-and-orange-peel beauty.

The spring releases underlies the greater significance of the wine industry in the Okanagan.

Wine has put the Valley on the map.

It's one of the region's four tourism cornerstones along with lakes and beaches, golf and skiing.

While dedicated wine touring, flitting from winery to winery for tastings, bottle purchases and wine-paired meals, is its own entity, there's also a lot of crossover.

Almost every beachgoer, golfer and skier will also incorporate some wine into their journey, be it a quick winery visit, glass apre ski or golf or bottle purchase to take home.

Wine also weaves its way into all five of the Okanagan's top-five economic engines — high tech, construction and real estate, retail-wholesale-trade, tourism and agriculture.

After all, winemaking is a science, people live, move and vacation here because it's a beautiful wine region, it's a commodity and an agricultural product.

In fact, as agricultural products go, wine is the most glamourous and value-added.

It gives the Okanagan a cachet that soybeans, wheat or parsnips never could.

All this vineous prowess essentially exploded in the past three decades.

In 1990, there were 17 wineries in the Okanagan.

Today there are about 350 wineries with 929 vineyards covering more than 10,000 acres.

One million people every year visit wineries and the industry is worth $2.8 billion annually to the BC economy.

Not bad for a sector that germinated in 1859 when Kelowna's first white settler and Jesuit priest, Father Jean-Charles Pandosy, planted some vines in order to make some sacramental wines.