Mirabel Vineyards

The Challenge

After several years selling its wines through local wineries and restaurants, Mirabel Vineyard, a small-scale winery in the Okanagan, decided to open a tasting room and retail space in an existing quonset hut on site. The building, built with beautiful old timber, needed to retain its heritage features while meeting modern building codes.

Kimco was also tasked with liaising with Fortis BC on setting up power for the space. After an initial study, Fortis proposed installing 600-amp, three-phased power for the site that would have cost roughly $50,000 per pole, and involved costly underground installations.

The Kimco Solution

Kimco went to bat for Mirabel with Fortis, getting the utility to move forward with a 600-amp, single-phase power and a far less costly installation. Owner Doug Reimer said he appreciated the company looking out for his interests.

Kimco also delivered on a pre-engineered electrical design for the quonset space. It worked with a local contractor to revamp the quonset and bring the electrical work up to current building codes. While the electrical design was engineered by a separate contractor, Kimco was heavily involved in ensuring the electrical concept for the barrel and tasting rooms and the retail space didn’t damage the building’s heritage features, or take away from the look. It also had similar considerations for the HVAC installation in the building.

As part of the building revamp, all the interior rooms were framed so each one had a ceiling, rather than extending the rooms all the way up to the quonset’s metal roof. Kimco electricians and HVAC professionals were careful about where they installed panels, and brought power and ventilation in from above the ceilings so the overall look was aesthetically pleasing.

Kimco is currently in the midst of working on a full-scale service upgrade to Mirabel’s processing facility. The upgrade will provide more power to the site’s crushing machines and separators.