Not cold enough for world-class Okanagan ice wine this winter

While the Okanagan was basking in a balmy winter, ice wine producers were waiting on edge to see if it would get cold enough to make the renowned dessert drink.

Ice wine began as a way to salvage frozen grapes that couldn’t be used for regular wine. Now some vineyards in the Okanagan bank on the -8 Celsius temperature needed to make it.

The overnight lows dropped to around -8 C in parts of the Okanagan over the weekend, but for some wineries those temperatures came too late.

“Unfortunately this year we couldn’t do ice wine,” general manager at Bench 1775 Winery Henry Bian told iNFOnews.ca. “We checked the long term forecast and we didn’t see any low temperatures, but just after the weekend we picked, it came.”

He said that since the grapes for ice wine have to be left on the vine until they freeze it can be a gamble to wait for the ideal temperature.

The longer the grapes are left on the vine the more likely they are to get damaged by birds, naturally fall off and end up rotten.

Bian said harvesting ice wine is tricky since it needs to happen at the right moment, which is sometimes in the middle of the night.

Ice wine harvests can happen anywhere from November until the end of February.

“One year we got Christmas Day,” Bian said. “Sometimes it will happen at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and then we need to try to get the pickers.”

Picking the grapes before they freeze isn’t a loss for the winery. Bian said they were able to use the grapes intended for ice wine to make a pinot noir and a sauvignon blanc.

The frozen grapes are turned into a sweet dessert wine that the president and CEO of Wine Growers BC Jeff Guignard said is known around the world.

“Here in BC, ice wine actually is a fairly small amount of what we produce overall, but what we do produce is absolutely world class,” he said.

A late harvest like Bench 1775’s can make a similar product even if it doesn’t meet the definition for ice wine.

“You can have a late harvest Riesling, which is a similar product to ice wine, it just doesn’t meet the actual standards for it,” he said.

Guignard said there are still some vineyards that might be gambling on a cold snap to bring the temperature low enough for ice wine.

“There’s a few of them out there that are saying, ‘hey, you know, we’re still hoping we’re watching the weather in February very closely to see if it gets cold enough,’” he said.

If the weather doesn’t cool off, Guignard said those vineyards will have to do what Bian did and adapt with a late harvest.

“Mother Nature is going to give us something every year,” he said. “It’s part of what’s exciting about the wine industry, particularly in a place like B.C., which is building a world-class wine industry in real time. So it’s a really exciting time to get to know those wineries, get to see what they’re doing.”