Wine in a Time of Climate Change
The Wild Ride That Was the 2022 Vancouver Island Vintage
WoRds by eRin Maher / imAges by unswoRth Vineyards
Do you like rides? How about wine? If you answered yes to both, Vancouver Island’s 2022 vintage was made for you.
Why? Because it was an absolute roller coaster. As the cart clicked upwards, and the vines awakened from their winter dormancy, a spring rain began to bucket down. It went on for months, constantly threatening to flood the vineyards. Once we’d finally crested that summit, the skies parted. And then abruptly filled with smoke, as we careened down into one of the longest droughts in Vancouver Island’s recorded history. The cart veered, clicked, and clacked around corner after corner, and all we could do was buckle in, get through it, and pray for the quality of what ended up in the glass.
Luckily, those prayers were heard. The results can be tasted in the delightful sparkling Charme de l’île rosé. It’s a dry 100% Pinot Noir layered with notes of raspberry and pomegranate that pairs well with saddling up to the bar at the Courtney Room.
Thankfully, all’s well that ended well for last season’s Island wines. As nerve-wracking as the journey towards the ‘22 harvest felt, it all started so simply: roots in the earth, leaves on the vine…
But things became complicated, quickly. Weird weather events swirled around us, which appears to have become the New Normal here in BC. The word “unprecedented” tastes like bad medicine now, but climate change has been forcing us to swallow forest fires, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, a dismally long, wet spring, and a record drought in the fall.
It’s enough to drive one to drink, as the saying goes. I know I’m not alone in drowning my climate concerns from time to time. My own wine education includes a master’s degree in Champagne, that I took alongside Unsworth Vineyards’s winemaker Dan Wright. This ignited a deep curiosity about how these climatic occurrences are affecting the wineries in our backyard.
I reached out to Dan, hard at work deep in Unsworth’s Cowichan Valley cellars, to get his take on what’s going on: will climate change decimate our beloved local wine supply? Thirsty minds need to know . . .
Unsworth’s winery is just a scenic forty-five-minute drive over the Malahat. It’s well worth the visit, if you haven’t been. The restaurant boasts two seasonal menus and a patio that edges out onto a vast lawn for croquet and bocce. The seating for the tasting room is about as picturesque as you could hope for, overlooking ponds, waterfalls, those quintessential vines, and pastoral farmland.
(If you’re looking to make a crawl of it, visit the Cider Fairies at nearby Merridale. And Stillhead Distillery and Red Arrow Brewery are just down the highway outside of Duncan. You can be back in Victoria in time for dinner.)
When it comes to Dan’s winemaking approach, he believes God is in the details, so of course he knew the amount of BC’s average rainfall off the top of his head. (He told me to “correct me if I’m wrong,” as if I might know better than him. My own approach to wine deals more with the devil in the glass, so I looked his figures up later. He was unsurprisingly bang on.)
Maybe the baffling spring rainfall of 2022 led Dan to question everything he knew about our weather patterns. That months-long downpour felt like it could only end with pairs of every animal boarding a huge wooden boat. “What was crazy about 2022 was that we had the wettest spring and the driest summer in a decade, so it was challenging on both sides. But it’s all about the timing,” he said.
That timing is crucial because it can determine whether a vintage fails entirely. Last year I served a wine flight to winemaker Dean Canadzich from Sea Star Winery on Pender Island, as he lamented how far the vines were behind their usual growth schedule. It was so serious that ripening might not have had a chance to occur at all.
I recalled Dean’s look of concern as Dan bemoaned that long, wet spring. “It didn’t really stop raining until the beginning of July, and I remember that because we were doing some grafting [transplanting portions of one vine onto another]. The grafters we brought up from California required it to stop raining. We kept having to push it back. So they came up on Canada Day.”
I had always been under the impression that Vancouver Island is typically wetter than other BC regions, making it tricky to grow here, but I learned that’s not the case. “It’s getting easier to make wine. We’ve had a string of good vintages. The last bad year was 2010, or 2011. We thought 2022 would be like that, but we got saved.”
The drought that followed seemed to make up for the wet spring, at least in terms of giving the grapes a chance to ripen. Everything was pushed back by about 3–4 weeks, but the streak of good vintages continues. As Dan says, “We ended up kind of middle-of-the-pack,” in terms of growing temperatures.
Even the heat dome from 2021 “was certainly strange and bizarre, but it was odd that it didn’t have a lot of impact on the vines. Everything went through flowering really quick, so it actually led to higher quality in that the grapes were more evenly ripe.”
When I asked him about plans to preemptively combat climate-related issues, he said they have a large irrigation pond in development to overcome potential drought conditions, and they are experimenting with cover crops like hickory for excess-water absorption. They always have the option to increase sparkling wine production too, taking a cue from the Champagne region in France, which has some of the world’s most difficult growing conditions. There they can manage a problematic vintage through choices made in production, and hide the challenges of the season.
Dan astutely summed up the 2022 vintage in the three phrases that inspired this article:
“Roller coaster. Nerve-wracking. All’s well that ends well.”
Despite the emotional whiplash of navigating our changing climate, there’s hope and positivity among our local wine producers. Their vines are resilient. The people working them are adaptable. When that 2022 vintage splashes into your glass, remember to cheers them. And keep coming along for the ride, Victoria. We’re in safe hands.
