For many of my readers outside of British Columbia and Canada, the news that there’s a wine-making industry in this neck of the woods will come as a shock.
Perhaps not as much of a shock as the climactic and economic shocks that have befallen the business here on the Left Coast of the Great White North, but still, I imagine you’ve been stunned by this revelation if facts about obscure wine places are not your usual thing. You haven’t heard of us because we sell almost all that we make in the province. Very little makes it to the export market*. Since it’s my day job (wine making and sales), allow me to explain.
* the rest of Canada, our own country, is an export market. Why? That’s for another day.
It’s true! Three hundred and something businesses hold all the necessary licenses and permissions from various authorities to produce fermented grape juices. Some use tree fruits and bee poo (bee n a cider if you know what I mead) but the majority are concerned with grapes.
“How is this possible?’ you may have pondered. After all, Canada lies nestled beneath a deep blanket of snow for most of the year. All of our food comes in on planes, trains and big rigs, canned, wrapped, dried and on Styrofoam trays. It’s not possible to ripen grapes for wine. Or is it?
Let’s shake off that heavy cloak of stereotypical, media-manufactured imagery of Canada and let me tell you about a few parts of the country that are, shall we dare say, temperate. Parts of Nova Scotia, Ontario and British Columbia, and if pressed, Quebec and New Brunswick, have some pockets and microclimates that can and often do produce outstanding wines from a number of popular types of vines, the names of which you would recognize if you liked wine and if I bothered to list them.
But I won’t.
For British Columbia, our most famous area is the Okanagan Valley, with a number of other areas through out the province which offer agricultural traits that allow the commercial production of wine grapes.
Let’s get back to the second paragraph and take a look at the shocks that have hit lately here in British Columbia.
Covid didn’t do us any favours. (Notice I spelled ‘favors’ like a Canadian?) It wasn’t helpful to many sectors but the wine industry out this way has a significant dependency on tourism so you can imagine how that went. Just as things were starting to ‘normalize’ halfway through 2021, wildfires interrupted our recovery during our busiest times of the year. While most operations weren’t directly fried by flames, highways were closed and the media dogpiled on to the public’s penchant for exaggerated reporting and wild-eyed declarations by hyping the worst of the news. Now, like everyone, I believe public safety is important. But telling everyone to cancel their plans and stay home because of a localized fire event is technically what we call a ‘dick move’.
Fast forward to December of 2022. We pick 99% of our grapes from August through early November. Then the vines go dormant until spring, when they wake up with a fresh haircut and a passion for making grapes. They’re tough when it comes to winter and sub-freezing temperatures. But in 2022 it got a little ridiculous. Suffice to say, it got too cold for too long and there was damage to the buds that were waiting for spring (Dig into the nerdy weather history here with Sean Sullivan) There was significant crop damage to the tune of about a 50% loss in the main growing area, the Okanagan Valley.
In the summer of 2023, we’re chugging along, making do, wearing our brave faces when more fires kick up in August. Once again, everybody goes home and they don’t come back, because it’s just too late in the summer to rejig your holidays. About 10 days of smoke and the balance of the high season is shite canned.
BOOM! January of 2024. The province’s relatively mild winter is suddenly punctuated with a diving fist drop off the top turnbuckle of weather by a 50+ hour polar vortex. Temperatures plummet to -30 C and snap, crackle, pop - it’s done.
The result is an almost complete loss of crop for 2024 and lasting vine decline for a few seasons.
We have been kicked while we were down. If you’d like to find out more of what’s up, check Luke’s article here
Help is on the way. Government and various industry bodies are putting their heads together to create some relief. There’s an announced replanting program so far and other ideas are being floated. But for many, this might be the end of the road. For some there’s been too many straws on the camel’s back and it’s time to cut losses and get out. Unsubstantiated sources have suggested as much as a third of all wineries are currently for sale.
The grim test for those that remain will be the challenge of finding the determination, conviction and cleverness from already depleted personal wells and make it work. There will be confusion as raw material is brought in from Elsewhere for processing and packaging (wine that is not local, but bottled local, and sold local) by some but not all. Confusion on the part of the industry learning to walk again and confusion by some consumers wondering exactly what is in the bottle they’re considering. Decades of building trust and familiarity with wine consumers and resellers will be at issue.
There is going to be a reckoning. Many operations let their wagons get out ahead of their horses. Do all grape varieties in all locations do equally well? If not, what is the prudent way forward? How do you convince the media to stop behaving like the villain (or more like the hapless henchman) in this story and do a little less pandering and a lot more balanced reportage? And now today I find out that PHONES maybe causing people to buy less wine.
Hard to say how this will all shake out but what gives me hope is the experience of much older regions with deep historical legacies. Many have sustained much worse and still managed to survive and prosper. It’s still early days. All will be revealed in time.
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