Why there may not be any Okanagan ice wine this winter
While the warm winter to date is not good for ice wine it’s not actually the reason why there may not be any produced in the Okanagan this season.
“Because we had quite a bit of winter damage last year, we didn’t have anything to harvest for the ice wine," Joshua Kim with Beach 1775 Winery in Penticton told iNFOnews.ca. “Not just us, pretty much everybody.”
Last year’s November cold snap killed off an estimated 29% of all grape vines in the Okanagan and damaged up to 45% of the vines.
READ MORE: Okanagan wine industry will take half a decade to fully recover: Wine Growers
Beach 1775 said on its website it’s one of the largest producers and exporters of ice wine in BC.
“I don’t hear of anybody doing late harvest for ice wine,” Kim said.
In order to make ice wine there has to be a few days of temperatures of -8 Celsius or more, which has yet to happen this year with January starting off much warmer than average as well.
Some years, the harvest can come in before the end of December, but during warmer winters it may take until February to get cold enough.
While there's still a chance for it to get cold enough this winter to make ice wine, the risk of possibly losing so many grapes while yields are down was just too great.
“It takes about 3.5 kilograms of Riesling grapes or three kilograms of Vidal grapes to produce one 375-millilitre bottle of ice wine,” says the Wine Country Ontario website. “The same amount of grapes would produce six to seven times as much table wine.”
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