Regulations for what B.C. wineries can put on wine bottles has evolved dramatically in the past decade, and more change could be on the way.
Ten years ago, wineries could put on wine labels that their wine was from B.C. If they wanted to be more specific, they were limited to being able to put that the wine was from one of five designated wine regions, or appellations:
- Okanagan Valley;
- Similkameen Valley;
- Fraser Valley;
- Vancouver Island; and
- Gulf Islands.
Wineries can now put four new geographic regions on wine labels:
- Lillooet;
- Shuswap;
- Thompson Valley; or
- Kootenays.
The Okanagan Valley's Golden Mile Bench then became first official sub-appellation for B.C. wine thanks to the B.C. government, on March 30, 2015, approving the designation. Other approvals for sub-appellations followed.
Days before the Golden Mile appellation approval, the B.C. government launched the BC Wine Appellation Task Group, which was an initiative to investigate and get winemaker approval for ways to improve the appellation system for wine produced from 100 per cent B.C. grapes.
That task group crafted a range of potential changes for winemakers to vote on in a mid-2016 plebiscite. Of those potential changes, 10 passed.
The B.C. government quickly implemented three of the changes and then took action to enact three more changes in the following years. It has yet to take action on the four remaining recommended changes for various reasons, B.C.'s Ministry of Agriculture and Food told BIV in an email earlier this month.
It is unclear whether those recommendations will ever be put into law.
The three regulatory changes that the B.C. government almost immediately implemented were that:
- B.C. wines that have an approved sub-geographical indication on the label, such as Golden Mile Bench, also must have the larger geographical identifier, Okanagan Valley, on the label;
- future votes on new sub-geographical regions will also be open to grape growers who do not produce wine; and
- wines produced in a proposed new sub-region no longer must consistently demonstrate specific distinctive characteristics linked to the terroir.
Some other changes followed, such as that:
- There would be a flat fee for small wineries to be regulated by the BC Wine Authority (BCWA);
- New geographical indications could be created; and
- There could be new sub-regions of those geographical indicators, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
The change to allow a flat fee for small wineries stemmed from what the task force's chair, Mike Klassen, called a "ridiculous" expense structure for wineries on Vancouver Island that needed to get wine sent to a testing centre in the Okanagan.
"There would be the shipping and the cost per bottle, when you've only doing 25 cases of a wine, or something like that, the expense of it was just ridiculous," he told BIV.
Creating new geographical indicators, or appellations, was one of the task force's biggest successes, Klassen added.
Klassen added that another successful result of his task force was "a proper framework for the sub-geographic indications. That's why you now can go buy wines that can claim to be grapes 100-per-cent grown in the Naramata Bench or Skaha Bench or Okanagan Falls or other places."
The B.C. government told BIV that four recommendations that passed in the plebiscite have yet to become law.
That includes:
- Changing the name “Wines of Distinction” to “British Columbia Wine";
- Prohibiting the use of unregulated geographical indications (GIs);
- Making membership in the BCWA mandatory; and
- Making wine certification mandatory.
"The use of 'British Columbia Wine' or other geographical names would have unfairly restricted the use of these general terms by British Columbians," the Ministry of Agriculture and Food said in its email.
It explained that forcing all B.C. winemakers to participate in the Wines of Marked Quality "would be a significant departure from the program's voluntary nature and was not unanimously supported by wine makers."
That program, it said, is voluntary and intended for B.C. wineries to participate in to certify and label their wines as having met quality standards of the program.
The government said that uncertified wines cannot be labelled as BC VQA, or use the term Wines of Distinction. Those wines also cannot use protected geographical indications, it said.
"That's still happening a little bit," Klassen said. "There are a few people who just refuse to buy in, but they're much harder to find."
A final notable wine-labelling change that came in the past decade was in March 2018, when the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency banned the use of the phrase "cellared-in-Canada" from wine bottles. •
