The Patio Team
Mark Ashton
Chef de Cuisine
Chef Mark Ashton brings close to three decades of culinary experience to the table.
After graduating from culinary school, he honed his skills in Vancouver’s fine dining industry before running the kitchen at an award-winning Italian restaurant. In early 2002, the lure of travel led him to explore the culinary roots of the Mediterranean, a cuisine he had grown to love. Cooking his way through Spain, Italy and the French Riviera, Mark deepened his culinary skills, passion and understanding of the region’s approach to seasonality and cooking farm-to-table.
This philosophy drives the menu at The Patio at Lake Breeze, aligning with our winery’s natural and minimal intervention approach to wine making. Partnering with the Okanagan’s strong farming communities, Mark’s focused dishes celebrate the seasons, elevating ingredients with bold and balanced flavours, expressing a delicious Mediterranean-meets-Okanagan sensibility.
For the past 12 years, Mark has garnered a loyal following for his cooking and his take-home selection of handcrafted sauces, dressings and provisions.
With the opening of the Farmstead at Lake Breeze, Mark has added animal husbandry and farmer to his skill-set. Ethically raising heritage pigs in 2020, culminated with the Patio’s first charcuterie program, and with the Farmstead’s organic produce.
Growing produce and raising animals only 100 steps from the kitchen, chef Mark Ashton’s farm-to-table dreams have become a laser-focused reality. We are proud to have him as part of our team.
Avalon Apolzer
Operations Manager
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Jessica Young
Farmstead Manager
Where most artists rely on paints and pastels, Jessica, the principal garden designer at Lake Breeze, prefers flowers and foliage as her medium. Applying colour and texture with form and function, and using the soil as her blank canvas, she has transformed the winery’s grounds from wild and overgrown to a stunning living green space, a living work of art.
Jessica discovered her calling while attending a Vancouver horticultural program over a decade ago before returning to her roots in Penticton. While running her own garden design company, she landed a job at Lake Breeze to transform and maintain the gardens and containers.
Through understanding the innate growth habits and cultural requirements of plants, her creativity was allowed to blossom and climb, creep and rise. These living works transform with the seasons, and are adored by both visitors and the MacIntyre family, who live on the property. Stunning with their colourful diversity and natural beauty, her design talents were recently acknowledged with a 2019 Garden of the Year (Winery Category) from the BC Garden Tourism Awards.
Hers is a naturalistic approach, crediting the New Perennial Movement as an inspiration. A movement, which views how each plant relates to the whole, while keeping design, beauty and biodiversity at hand.
With exacting principles, innate plant knowledge and confidence in her creative process, Jessica has also added edible landscaping to her skill set. As fulltime farm manager at the newly established Farmstead, she is going with the flow of mixing the plant artist in her with productive food farming, maintaining proper soil health, and taking care of the resident livestock. “I suppose you could call me a farmer now, but I’ll always be a gardener at heart.” And a powerful saying drives Jessica’s edible landscape: “the food on your plate is only as good as the soil beneath your feet”.