CheckMate Winery is a top-selling winery based out of the Canadian Okanagan, owned and operated by the Mark Anthony Group. When approached with the design concept, McKinley Studios was challenged to redefine the Okanagan wine experience, taking the typical Okanagan wine tasting from a normative, in-and-out transaction to a luxury event parallel to the positioning of CheckMate wine. Being the only wine in Canada to ever receive a 100-point score. In our client’s words “We want to change the game with both our wine product and the wine tasting experience”. The impetus of the design concept itself was to create an abstract expression of the CheckMate brand identity, which is based on the game of chess, and to create a strong overarching concept that extends the narrative of the product to the physical space, while avoiding any cliché applications, which would have lessened the brand positioning.