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Wineries closely watching highway situation

Though things are okay for now, wine growers closely monitoring supply chain concerns.

  • Storage in Vancouver warehouse has limited supplies
  • Potential financial problems for wineries

As grocery stores face supply chain disruptions to fresh produce and dairy, the wine industry is breathing easy, for now.

Crippled highways have growers facing hurdles accessing some materials.

And while the Lower Mainland was swamped thanks to an atmospheric river, Wine Growers of British Columbia President and CEO Miles Prodan said much of the crop there is already harvested and being pressed in tanks.

However, he said Okanagan wineries not being able to access the Lower Mainland market will be problematic.

“With these constraints on getting supplies into the market, it’s going to be problematic for us,” he told Kelowna10.

Warehouses in Vancouver are currently storing products for a few wineries in B.C., but much of it is from last season.

“Once that’s depleted, for anyone who doesn’t have warehouse storage there, then their cut off,” Pardon said. “We got warehouses and there’s some wine there, we got wine on shelves, but the longer this goes on the more problematic this will be.”

Though wine is not as perishable as fruit and vegetables, wineries still cashflow.

“The winery needs to sell that wine for revenue to keep running the business. They need to make sure the wine is flowing, and in that market,” Prodan said.

He added how these events are prime examples of how susceptible the wine industry is.

“When we had a cold weather event in the spring, it impacted the size of the grapes for this year’s harvest. [Then] a heat dome shut the vines down. And now we have a weather event that has the potential of impacting our access to markets,” he said. “We are farmers, and we are susceptible, and we stand in support of our farming colleagues around the province especially those directly affected in the lower mainland.”

Published 2021-11-17 by Connor Chan

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