“Scotch for me has everything you'd want from a spirit,” he wrote. “It has history. Highland Park was started in 1798 by a man called Magnus Eunson. He was a priest and would make whisky illegally and then hide the casks under the pulpit of his church. (Scotch) has tales of smuggling, murder, love and perseverance.

“The one in Vancouver is so vastly successful we wanted to take this somewhere else,” he explains, adding he scouted other cities like Seattle, Whistler, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria. “It was just so obvious when we got to the Okanagan that this was the place to be.”