Okanagan-produced wine expected to be in short supply starting next year

Okanagan-produced wine at the liquor store may be hard to find in the foreseeable future.

Store shelves may have little to no locally produced vintages as wineries hold onto what they have.

“A lot of them will be pulling it back out of the retail channels because they want to be able to have wine to sell and make available for people who come to the winery,” said Miles Prodan, president and CEO of Wine Growers British Columbia. “January’s extreme cold decimated the vast majority of grape crops. ”

“At the moment we are looking at what essentially will be 100 per cent crop loss is what we think,” said Dave Paterson, general manager and winemaker at Tantalus Vineyards in Kelowna.

With the latest hit from Mother Nature, consumers are being warned to expect a shortage of locally produced wine.

“Next year and the year after there’ll be significant shortages of our products,” Paterson said.

White wine is expected to be in short supply first followed by the reds.

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Paterson said the full extent of this year’s crop damage won’t be known until  May when the buds typically break but many winery operators have taken bud samples to test and it’s not looking promising.

“We have done some testing, a lot of wineries have and the majority of wineries that we talked to have stated that there is damage, even the science research centre says they’ve seen quite a bit of damage on their blocks,” said Bobby Gidda, owner of Volcanic Hills Estate Winery.

Gidda said it’s been a tough go for the industry in recent years.

His 2023 harvest saw an 80 per cent loss in volume due to weather factors in 2022.

“To give you an idea…pinot gris for example, we do roughly about 1000 cases per year. I’ll be lucky to hit about 300 cases this year here.  Rosé, we do somewhere between 750 to 800 cases. I’ll be lucky to hit two hundred cases,” Gidda said.

With this latest blow, he will have to re-think how the wine he does have will be distributed.

“We might have to be selective on which restaurant or liquor store carries it because we want to be able to make sure that people that are visiting our doorstep that we have product. They made the trip. Make sure they have it, Gidda said. “If you go into your favorite liquor store or a restaurant, you may not find that bottle.”

Wine operators are now banding together trying to come up with solutions including possibly bringing in grapes from elsewhere.

“Ontario,  so an all Canadian solution, or maybe closer, closer to home, geographically with Washington and maybe Oregon or further afield,” Paterson said. “We don’t really know yet what we’re going to be allowed to do and time is of the essence to be able to start looking at doing those deals.”

Patterson said the efforts are critical  in order to preserve a healthy and competitive market.

“Not lose all of that shelf space to cheaper imports, not lose the LDB and the restaurant business to other regions,” Paterson said. “Because then when we do have wine in the future, that’s going to take a lot of work to get that market back.”

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