09-06-2025
BC winemakers adjust for ‘scary' future beyond their control
It was impossible to miss the pride in winemaker Leandro Nosal's voice as he described the "more complex and a little more generous" flavours in his 2024 vintage of Okanagan sauvignon blanc at a late May wine tasting in Vancouver.
The wine was the progeny of a hard year, he explained. In January 2024, a brutal cold snap hit the Okanagan Valley after weeks of unseasonably warm weather. The extreme weather devastated the valley's vineyards — as well as orchards of peaches, plums, and apricots — killing thousands of vines and wiping out close to 98 per cent of the grape harvest.
Nosal's winery, Tinhorn Creek, in Oliver, BC, lost about half of its vines; those that didn't die produced a minuscule crop. Desperate for grapes, he looked south, hunting for vineyards in Washington and Oregon that grew the same varieties, in similar environments — and had enough of a surplus to provide him the raw ingredients for his 2024 vintages.
The difficulties didn't stop there. Wine's distinct flavours are shaped by the land ('terroir') where the grapes grow, how they're handled during and after the harvest, and how the winemaker decides to ferment the grape juice and age the wine. It was a challenge producing a wine that still echoed the vineyard's general theme with new grapes, from a new terroir, with different qualities and unfamiliar limitations.
"We had to learn a lot, very fast," said Nosal. "That's what makes wine so interesting, is that you have endless combinations or different factors and you can create many different things."
That kind of creativity is poised to become critical in years to come as the climate crisis deepens. Extreme weather — cold snaps, extreme heat, storms, wildfires — are becoming more common across Canada. The stakes are high: BC's wine industry alone is worth about $3.7 billion, and the extreme weather will harm other crops as well.
Climate models show that agricultural regions across the country will see drier summers and increased precipitation in winter and spring, driving flooding and droughts. Erratic temperature swings like the Okanagan 2024 cold snap and the 2021 heat dome are also poised to become more common, stressing crops, farmers and farm workers.
In January 2024, a brutal cold snap hit the Okanagan Valley after weeks of unseasonably warm weather. The extreme weather devastated the valley's vineyards, wiping out close to 98 per cent of the grape harvest and forcing winemakers to adapt.
Those concerns are top of mind for Nosal and other Okanagan farmers — entire vineyards, wiped out by extreme weather, devastating the livelihoods of farmers, farm workers and winemakers. An industry that draws over a million tourists to rural parts of the province each year — gone.
"The first word that comes to mind is 'anxiety,'" said Nosal.
Hits on all sides
The 2021 heat dome was a pivotal moment. Many growers in the region felt that "nothing was the same" after it, Nosal recalls. Temperatures soared well above 40°C, which forced the grapes to stop photosynthesizing and ripening fruit, harming the wine and the plants' long-term health.
The heat is brutal for employees, many of them temporary foreign workers who come to BC each summer from Mexico, Jamaica and a handful of other countries. On Nosal's vineyard, people have started working very early in the morning during the summer, with the goal of wrapping up the day by noon to escape extreme heat.
Exposure to extreme heat can cause dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, particularly for farm workers who spend their days doing hard, physical labour under a beating sun. Worksafe BC, the province's workplace safety insurer, reported that compensation claims spiked by 180 per cen t during the 2021 heat dome.
Then there's wildfire smoke: Recent years have seen record-breaking fires sweep across Canada and the Okanagan, smothering both in a thick pall of smoke. Beyond harming people, smoke penetrates grape skins, giving the finished wine a strong, unpleasant smoky flavour known as 'smoke taint.'
A fire's proximity to the vineyard, combined with the ripeness of the grapes, will influence how much smoke gets imparted into the wine, but with increasingly unpredictable fires and smoke patterns, winemakers need to be ready for the worst, said Nosal.
It is possible to remove smoke taint from the wine after it is fermented by running it through a high-tech filter system that retains the smoke molecules. But the technology is expensive, he said, impacting wine prices and making it hard to access for smaller growers.
Farmers across Canada are facing similar problems because of extreme weather, said Evan Fraser, a professor at the University of Guelph and director of the Arrell Food Institute. While technologies, like smoke filters or massive shade nets, can help them adapt to many of these more erratic conditions, using them extensively risks increasing food prices.
And unless governments do more to tackle housing costs and wages, widespread adoption of the technologies could send food insecurity in Canada soaring, he said.
"We're picking at the proverbial Gordian knot of problems," he said.
What makes a wine from BC?
It is no small matter to slap a made-in-BC sticker on a bottle of wine. A maze of rules largely determined by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) control what winemakers can put on their labels: wines made in BC from BC-grown grapes have one designation, the VQA. Wines blended in Canada have another. Wines made with non-BC grapes have yet another.
That system was thrown into disarray in 2024, when winemakers like Nosal had to source grapes from vineyards outside the region, and sometimes even fermented those wines outside BC. Labelling those wines appropriately was essential to maintain consumer trust, but winemakers weren't sure how to do it, explained Courtney Henderson, marketing director at VQA wines for Andrew Peller Ltd.
"There was a lot of navigation around this project in general," she said, noting the problem was new for the industry. After months of lobbying, the agency gave the industry more clear guidelines last August — after most wineries had already placed orders for labels modified to reflect the 2024 vintage's unique characteristics. Most of the labels already complied with the guidelines, but it was a preview of a real conversation that will become more common.
While all of BC's vineyards are facing similar challenges from a changed climate, the smaller ones are poised to suffer the most, explained John Janmaat, an environmental economist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
Take the 2024 cold snap. The weather event hit smaller, more vulnerable wineries that were just scraping by, forcing many to consider selling out to larger operations that could afford to replant and adapt to extreme weather and smoke, he said.
It's not just happening in the wine industry; Statistics Canada reported last year that the average farm size in Canada almost doubled in the past 50 years due to consolidation. Critics say consolidation gives large companies too much influence over what is grown, and how, with impacts on food prices, farm workers' welfare and what kind of farming is prioritized.
Climate isn't solely responsible for that shift: technological advances have made larger farms possible, while the soaring cost of farmland has made it hard for young people to buy land and start their own operations. But the climate crisis is exacerbating that dynamic by making smaller farms, which are already vulnerable, more likely to fold, said Janmaat.
For Nosal, those broader issues are framed by the more immediate challenge of adapting his craft in the coming years. In the meantime, he's relishing the sight of new growth in the Okanagan's vineyards after last year's devastation.
