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Thoughts on 2024 - The Non-BC BC vintage and other signs the BC industry has changed
Every now and then, I take a look around at where I am and think, “How did I get here?” I had this thought as I was bobbing around English Bay in a tiny sailboat called “Water Music” on a sunny day in the summer of 2000. It was only months before that I’d been fighting my way to work through snowstorms in small town New Brunswick, and now here I was in a boat on the other side of the continent. How did I get here?
Looking at the new shelves in a Penticton liquor store, I was struck by this same thought. The store used to have large shelves filled with wines from British Columbia and categorized by region (Naramata, Oliver, Similkameen, etc). They shared a parking lot with a supermarket that also sold wine and the two had existed for many years. BC VQA wines were in the supermarket and harder-to-find BC wines were at the liquor store. A few months ago, this store removed all of those sections and replaced the BC wines with other products. The store still has BC wine, but it is no longer front and centre as it had been. How did BC wine get here?
My first book, Valleys of Wine, was published in 2019. I wanted it to be a comprehensive history of the wine industry in British Columbia and that’s indeed what it is. I am still proud of it but I also see it now as a snapshot of the industry at that time. It was released just over five years ago, but a lot of things have changed.
In 2019, the possibilities for the BC wine industry still seemed endless. There weren’t really any seriously bad (or as wineries like to say, ‘challenging’) vintages. If something went weird, it was usually written off as a 'wet year’ or as a ‘small lot’ experiment. New wineries that had made only two or three vintages could confidently sell their wines proclaiming the primacy of their terroir and tell customers in their brand new wine shop that they could age their wines for a decade or more. Investment money flowed freely into the industry and life was good. Wineries opened at a rate that made it difficult to keep up. John Schreiner wrote about new wineries being a part of the “Class of 2013” on his blog. It really was wine’s wild west.
In 2019, nobody could have imagined that we would see wines made in BC from grapes grown outside of BC. In a few months these wines will start hitting the shelves. How did we get here?
As a wine consumer, you might have heard in the news that the BC wine industry has had a few rough years. Since 2020, Covid lockdowns, a couple of cold winters, wildfires and floods (and worse - the way that the government communicated information about these disasters) have all punched the industry in the collective nether region. On its own, a bad vintage or two isn’t really a problem because it only affects production. As long as a winery can manage their inventory and welcome tourists, they’ll be fine. A bad tourist season isn’t really a problem either because there will always be next year and as long as production is good, wine can be sold in other channels and other markets.
Shit really hits the fan when all of those things happen simultaneously, which is precisely what happened over the last 5 vintages. In addition, consumers only see the worst of it on the news because bad things are the only thing that ‘traditional’ news media bothers to report now. Attention-grabbing headlines sell, which is not new, but it’s a lot easier to come by. Social media only offers the worst dregs of it too because, again, that’s not what sells but also what the Algorithm Almighty thinks you want to see. The only good news that people click on are kittens and puppies, and it’s not to learn anything, it is to distract. That’s not the same thing.
If there is one thing that unifies the history of the wine industry in this province, it is that they tend to over-state things. Last winter, during the coldest part of the winter, social media posts were blowing up from wineries saying that their buds were damaged, there would be no fruit this year, and that their vines were all dead. Based on bud dissections in reports1 and news stories2, the forecast called for a 100% chance of no grapes for the 2024 vintage. Even though the reports said that it was the crop that was potentially damaged, what most of the general public heard was that all of the vines in the Okanagan were dead and that wineries weren’t going to be able to make any wine this year.
For anyone that visited a winery in the Okanagan this past summer, the green fluffy vines in most vineyards certainly did not look “all dead”. Turns out, they were only mostly dead. As Miracle Max said in the Princess Bride, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” The vines had no grapes on them but that wasn’t obvious to visitors. These vines were clearly alive, which is not what they remembered hearing. The dissonance between the “all dead” bad news in the winter and what they were seeing with their own eyes caused confusion. These people were the brave stalwarts who decided to come to the Okanagan in spite of the bad news and potential fire risk. How many people chose to go to places other than the Okanagan for their summer holiday because of this same news? We might never really know.
So, after taking all of those hits for five years and all of the bad / overstated news about it, many wineries in the Okanagan Valley are resorting to something that may change the way consumers think about wine produced in the Okanagan: They are bringing in grapes from outside of BC so that they can produce wine for the 2024 vintage. For the record, I personally am neither for or against any winery’s decision to import grapes or not. They are businesses that are not mine to mind. If it keeps the lights on and people employed, I’m all for it. I have had pangs of concern for some of the wineries that I know that are not bringing in grapes. What I think is irrelevant.
What is relevant is the consumer. What’ going to happen to the way that wine drinkers will think about wine produced in BC? Or will this just be a blip on the screen that most people won’t even notice?
My sense is that most non-industry following regular wine drinkers (and staff who sell wine in liquor stores) won’t really even notice the difference. Maybe they’ll notice that the labels or caps look a little different on familiar winery or brand names. Otherwise, if they’ve liked (or have recommended wines from) Winery X in the past, they will probably continue to do so without so much as a thought about where the actual grapes come from. They might notice a slight difference in flavour or maybe an odd grape variety name. Beyond that, I really don’t think people will actually take much notice.
I should also point out that wineries in coastal areas like Vancouver, Fraser Valley, and the Gulf Islands haven’t had as many problems as the interior wineries since they did not get the same deep freezes, reckless fire evacuation orders, or smoke issues that the interior received. Unless they depend on getting grapes from the Okanagan, they will be fine. Most of their wines will be made from their own grapes.
So this New Year’s, take a moment to look at the bottle of wine you are opening for your celebration (or breakfast - no judgments here), see where you are, and appreciate how you got here.
Happy New Year, sipsters. Thank you for being a subscriber to Sipster’s Icons. I appreciate you all very much. If you haven’t in a while, please reach out to say hi. Cheers!
~Luke
https://profils-profiles.science.gc.ca/en/blog/resiliency-face-changing-climate-how-catastrophic-cold-damaged-okanagan-wine-grapes-british?wbdisable=true
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wine-crop-loss-due-to-cold-snap-1.7115219