Importing grapes may save the Okanagan wine industry
Okanagan grape growers and winery owners – who are often the same people – are looking for innovative ways to keep the industry alive despite losing the entire 2024 crop to this winter’s deep freeze.
“There’s lots of ideas being floated around and it’s really going to come down to regulation and whether we’re able to go and find juice from elsewhere to continue bottling wine,” David Paterson, general manager and winemaker at Tantalus Vineyards in Kelowna, told iNFOnews.ca.
“None of this is concrete. None of this is allowed yet but in my mind there would be a special dispensation while we recover our vineyards that we are allowed to make something. I’m not sure what that looks like yet.”
While 58% of the crop was lost in 2023 as a result of a severe cold snap the previous winter, Tantalus still has supplies dating back to 2021.
“We still have plenty of wine and it’s business as normal, essentially,” Paterson said. “I’m not going to pull out of shelf space right away at this stage but when we come around another full cycle and we’re this time next year and we’ve sold through a lot of that at that stage we might need to look at our (marketing) channels if we, as an industry and a government, haven’t been able to find a way to fill the shortfall.”
READ MORE: Okanagan grape harvest wiped out for 2024
Growers and wine associations are working together and are hoping to meet with government officials in key ministries within two weeks to see if a temporary change can be made to liquor rules to allow wineries to import grapes and/or juice.
“The idea is not only to keep market share for BC businesses by getting juice from Ontario or further afield, but it’s also all those residual jobs that come with a vibrant wine industry – the wine tour industry, the hotels, the restaurants, the HVAC people, the electricians,” Paterson said.
“All these people that are residually employed, maybe not 100% by the wine industry, but certainly the businesses that do that kind of work often have multiple wineries as clients and if all of those suddenly disappear then those businesses retract too.
“There’s a big potential domino effect that really affects the entire valley right down to land prices and house values if we’re not careful. What we’re trying to fight for is to keep this industry vibrant by making something this year. Where that comes from is out of our hands at the moment, which is frustrating, for sure.”
Time is of the essence
“It’s very hard to make plans when you’re not allowed to make plans,” Paterson said. “We need to be making those plans in the next 90 days, not have bureaucrats fuddle about for a year before they say yes or no to something. By then it’s too late.”
Just as important as lifting the restrictions on importing grapes is the need to have strong rules on how that wine is marketed.
“Ontarians did this in the early 2000s after a big freeze for them,” Paterson said. “They allowed import juice but they didn’t put a lot of regulation on that. A lot of producers just blended it away with a minimum amount of Ontario wine that they made and then tried to flog it off as Ontario wine.
"They got caught with that and they lost a lot of brand loyalty and consumer base because they lied. We’re not looking to lie or pull the wool over anyone’s eyes and to be incredibly truthful with what we’ve done.”
READ MORE: Don’t count Okanagan wine industry out just because this year’s crop is gone
He believes he has the contacts to, for example, get good Riesling grapes from Washington State growers in order to produce a quality 2024 Tantalus wine that would not be labelled as BC VQA but would be clearly marked as being made from grapes out of Washington State.
“If we’re taking Washington as an example, the Pinot Noir in Washington is incredibly similar to the Okanagan,” Paterson said. “We’ve just drawn a human derived arbitrary line on a map to say this is where the U.S. starts and this is where Canada ends but geographically it’s still an extension of the Northern Sonoran desert. The soil types are very similar. The climate is quite similar. It’s just a little bit further south.”
Similarly, the Riesling grapes grown in Ontario come from the same German clone stock as those in BC.
“I have tasted many Ontarian Rieslings that when I put them next to mine it's very hard to tell – if they’re made well – which is which when you taste it blind,” Paterson said.
Ontario grapes crushed to make red wines are not so similar to those in the Okanagan but it makes sense to be able to market a quality Canadian-made wine that keeps people in the Okanagan working, he said.
“While we recover our vineyards, it’s important that we are allowed to make something to keep all of our winemakers and cellar hands and everyone employed so we don’t get a huge brain drain out of this community,” Paterson said.
“If every winery has nothing to make and has to lay off all their employees, those people aren’t suddenly coming back when we have grapes in a couple of years. We’d have a massive labour shortage if there is a resurgence of the industry.”
That happened in the restaurant industry during COVID and that industry is still struggling with staff shortages, he noted.
Any dispensation from government needs to be for a set volume and for a set time, just until the vineyards recover.
How long that recovery will take is unknown right now.
While the cold weather in January killed all the buds, it’s not known yet how many of the plants also died.
If the vines revive, some grapes will be turned into wine in 2025. If there was a massive kill-off of the vines, it could take up to five years to get replacement stock and have them mature enough to produce commercial quantities of grapes.
The upside to the importation of grape juice approach is that along with preserving jobs it’s not a government handout.
“Allow the wineries to operate as wineries,” Paterson said. “If there is some sort of stipend or handout, it should go to farmers, in my opinion, and that should, potentially, be on an acreage basis, whether it’s grapes, cherries, peaches, whatever.
“Farmers need help because of the catastrophe. Wineries need the help in a different way – not necessarily in a monetary handout but in an ability to operate.”
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