Pandemic steals icewine’s lustre

This could be the week for harvesting icewine grapes, but fewer wineries will picking

The ongoing pandemic has cooled the enthusiasm of Okanagan vintners for making icewine.

Only 12 wineries have said they’ll be producing the niche product this year, down from as many as 22 in recent winters.

One possible reason for the decline is wineries have significant left-over quantities of ice wine because far fewer international tourists visited the Okanagan last year because of COVID-19 travel restrictions.

“The international market is a big one for B.C. icewine. And obviously we didn’t see the same number of international visitors last summer,” Laura Kittmer, spokesperson for the B.C. Wine Institute, said Tuesday.

“My speculation is that some wineries had icewine left over from last year, so they’ve just decided not to make it this year,” Kittmer said.

As well, last summer and fall was a “stellar” season for grapes, Kittmer notes. So wineries may have opted to use their full vineyards for the production of table wines, rather than set aside sections for the potentially lucrative but risky business of making icewine.

“They might have decided to pick it all rather than leave grapes out for icewine,” Kittmer said.

Icewine forms a small but lucrative sector of the valley’s overall wine industry. Grapes are left out after the bulk of the harvest is completed, and aren’t plucked from the vines until temperatures reach minus 8 C or colder.

At that temperature, grapes have lost most of their water content, and the remaining sugars yield a super-concentrated, sugary mix that can be fermented in a matter of months.

Making icewine is risky, however, because the longer the grapes are left in the vineyards, the more chance there is of them drying out or being eaten by birds.

After weeks of mild weather, the forecast is for colder temperatures with highs of only about –4 C from Thursday through Sunday, and overnight lows of –10 C on Thursday and Friday.

“Wineries are looking to get those grapes off the vines, so I would expect the icewine harvest to take place this week,” Kittmer said.

The latest harvest of grapes for ice wine was Feb. 25, 2002. In the last 30 years, there’s never been a winter when icewine wasn’t made in the Okanagan, Kittmer said.