Out of the smoke in Canada’s western winelands

This year was one punctuated by dramatic wildfires. I watched in anguish as Lahaina burned in my home state of Hawai’i. Based in New York City, I looked up at cloudy summer skies before any warnings sounded and anticipated rain. Instead of rain came days of zero visibility and an apocalyptic haze blanket as smoke drifted south from Canadian wildfires. This September, news of mass evacuation orders and warnings not to travel to West Kelowna, British Columbia dominated news headlines. Only a day before I arrive in Kelowna is the McDougall Creek Fire considered held. The fire continued to burn, but by the time my plane touched down, it was no longer devastating crops or sending burning logs across Lake Okanagan to ignite more fires.

This was not my first time in the Okanagan. As a speaker and chef long involved with the Terroir Symposium, which celebrates Canadian producers, farmers, chefs and winemakers, and brings everyone together in an intensive series of panels and dinners over three days, I made a usual detour through western Canada’s wineries, on route to the main events in Calgary and Banff. At Terroir, we’d be discussing the issues most urgent to Canada’s food and restaurant scenes on a global stage, while tasting and sipping wines primarily from British Columbia, as well as other provinces.

Trudging through the glacial deposit-rich soil of the Okanagan Valley, stepping over the eagerly grazing goats of organic wineries like Off the Grid, meandering through the jewel box cellars of Phantom Creek (the basement cellar boats a pumpkin-orange Chihuly chandelier), and sniffing a fruit-salady ehrenfelser from 2022 while chickens shriek amongst the vines at Summerhill Pyramid Winery (where the wines are aged in a literal pyramid), wines come alive in a way impossible to replicate in a SAIT classroom commandeered by Terroir’s sommeliers.

_{Harvest table, the final meal at Terroir. Photo author's own}

The theme of this year’s Terroir was ‘Transformation’ – a notion that British Columbia’s wine producers have had to adopt many times over in their three-decade history. Terroir’s organisers put the full abundance of Western Canada on display, as butchers spent days breaking down an elk in view of the symposium’s participants, celebrated Canadian chefs in Banff’s historic Fairmont Hotel and addressed head-on the indigenous absence in much of Canada’s food scene. It also provided a rare opportunity for everyone to study Canadian wines with master sommeliers.

British Columbia’s vineyards exist in extremes, often experiencing intense heat and cold within the same day. The diurnal temperature shift can be 30 degrees Celsius as the warmth of the sun is manifested in intense fruit flavours and exceptionally cool nights preserve natural acidity. Winter temperatures dip below -20 degrees Celsius and tip over 40 degrees in summer. These extremes give rise to exceptional dry rieslings and robust, tannic cabernet sauvignons, but also a vast array of other grape varieties that innovative winemakers have experimented with growing over the course of the region’s relatively short winemaking history, which only truly began in the 1990s.

With extreme weather comes extreme wine. Farmers and winemakers show as much resilience as the wine they nurture into existence. Everyone has learnt and adapted through catastrophe.

_{Summerhill Pyramid Winery. Photo author's own}

British Columbia’s wine country is a far, scrappier cry from the manicured vineyards and Disneyesque wineries of Napa Valley, 1600km to its south. Most British Columbia wineries are family owned and operated. The wines are difficult to obtain in the neighbouring US and just as difficult in other Canadian provinces, due both to restrictive laws and a refrain I heard over and over: “We don’t export wine because we don’t need to. And we don’t make much.” An exception to this rule is ice wine to China, where it is especially prized. In other words, you must go to the Okanagan Valley to drink its marvellous, almost dizzyingly diverse, wines.

Two decades ago, Intrigue Wines' Roger Wong was a winemaker at Tantalus and had just started his line of FOCUS Riesling. In September 2003, as a direct result of the fires in the Okanagan he issued a series of empty but sealed bottles with labels reading “000ML and 00.0% ALC | Vol” on the front. On the back, “Yes, we know the bottle is empty. Our vision is to produce world class riesling from grapes grown here in the Okanagan Valley. When FOCUS was launched in 2002 it was very well received… All was looking good for 2003… until the fire… Thanks to the hundreds of firefighters and volunteers who made sure no lives were lost; to the grape growers who offered some of their own crop for our product. And to all the FOCUS advocates who believe we can be world class… Enjoy some other great BC wines while we get the 2004 vintage ready. Cheers!”

Since then, enormous strides have been taken in researching how to manage vineyards affected by smoke. Wong describes how stripping wine with charcoal also strips it of desired flavours, so his process evolved. When he encountered ash sitting on his fruit, he vertically positioned the vines. When grown in canopies, grapes trap ash. "We've tried sprayers and helicopters, but once you add moisture – rain – it's stuck. You can't get rid of it. So here rows run east to west and right before picking, we take leaves off by hand. After fires in 2021, the picker's arms were black with soot." Growing grapes in the Okanagan requires constant problem solving. "Smoke is one thing, ash is another and close proximity smoke is yet another. We've been dealing with climate change for a long time."

Not every single winery is affected by fires and smoke. According to some winemakers, a vineyard needs to be submerged in smoke for three weeks before it tinges wine. And yet, smoke has become a characteristic of Okanagan wines.

_{Wine at Kalala}

2020 was an outstanding year for the wines of British Columbia – though wineries had no visitors due to the pandemic. "Normally you see that year on a bottle, and you want to cringe," say the winemakers at Ex Nihilo, but not when it comes to wine. In 2022, wineries all over the Okanagan experienced a bumper crop. This year, crops will once again be lean. Restaurants and wineries across the region were on evacuation orders due to fires burning and water sources contaminated by fire-fighting chemicals.

Driving on the outskirts of Kelowna, black skeletons of trees stab at a sky vacillating between bright blue and grey with unusually heavy rain and I look upon twisted metal road dividers and large stretches of scorched mountainside. Areas closer to Lake Okanagan are as verdant as ever, with intentionally tangled vines hiding the ends of so many rainbows.

Stopping into the Kalala Organic Estate Winery, named for the Indian village Karmail Singh Sidhu (pictured below) hails from, it's a clear, beautiful day. Simpsons-esque cartoon clouds drift and obscure the tops of mountains. “I haven’t tasted it in the grapes yet,” says Sidhu. He points to the mountain, where a swathe of trees is missing and there’s a stretch of black, alarmingly close to another winery tucked into the valley. "It’s part of living in the Okanagan,” he says.

Sidhu’s favourite varietal is zweigelt – “the wine itself is a little spicy, too.” He was one of the first to plant it in the Okanagan and it is purposefully designed, like many of Kalala’s wines, to pair well with the flavours of Indian food. Sidhu is an engineer by trade who clearly transfers his skills into tinkering with wines. He jumps out of his seat and spontaneously pours me a finger of just-fermented port, made from merlot and nothing else. At 22% ABV currently, it makes my eyes water slightly, but it's easy to taste its potential.

Wineries of many layered, multicultural histories exist in the Okanagan. From Kalala, it’s an hour and a half drive south to Osoyoos Lake, which Moon Curser Vineyards overlooks. Named for moonlight-evading gold rush smugglers, Moon Curser specialises in “clandestine” grape varieties like touriga nacional and tannat. I sip on their 2021 malbec which tastes like blueberry pie. Tannat is their bestseller and winemaker Christian Scagnetti aptly describes it as a “fireplace wine.”

British Columbia is onto something in redesigning their vineyards to be fire and smoke resistant and growing grapes well-suited to their regions, rather than what the market deems popular.

_{Moon Curser Vineyards at moonrise. Photo by Lionel Trudel}

I look to Brian Freedman, a wine, spirits, and travel writer and author of Crushed: How a Changing Climate is Altering the Way We Drink to give me some perspective on climate change and the need to support lesser-known wine-producing regions like British Columbia. “We’re seeing producers around the world starting to work with grape varieties that will ripen and be ready to be picked earlier in the season. There is no saviour variety that will ripen everywhere in the world. People talk about silver bullet solutions for the wine world but there is no one wine world. There are different microclimates from one side of a mountain to another.” The winegrowers in BC recognise this and thus plant a large variety of grapes.

Freedman continues: “The people who are responsible for these liquids – wines and spirits – are the most forward deeply thinking professionals I have ever met. This is everywhere around the world – a world with a dramatically changing climate. There are going to be victories and defeats.”