Rajen Toor’s 2023 harvest should have been an occasion to celebrate. Toor and his wife Bree, the duo behind wine label Ursa Major, had just purchased their own vineyard in the fall of 2022. For six years, Toor had been making his small-batch wines from grapes purchased from his family winery in Oliver, B.C., and, more recently, from a vineyard he and Bree leased on the Naramata Bench. Harvesting the first crop from their own vineyard would have been a triumph for two young winemakers.“We’d seen the place and fallen in love,” Toor says of their Keremeos vineyard. But after a mild winter — an increasingly common occurrence in B.C.’s Interior — a sudden cold snap dropped temperatures in the Similkameen Valley down to -25 C in December 2022. The Syrah, Viognier and Zinfandel vines that were already planted on the property were severely stressed. “It not only killed the buds, but most of the vines,” Toor says. Now, more than a year later, he’s ripping dead vines out of the ground.
Source: B.C. winemakers grapple with the climate crisis | The Narwhal
