Tourism Threatens Water Security in Okanagan

Image by: Chris Mason Stearn

Poor liquidity: The Okanagan has Canada's lowest per-capita supply of water, and yet consumes it at twice the average rate.

Are wine-fuelled tourism and migration threatening water security in the South Okanagan?

In the bone-dry southern tip of the Okanagan Valley, just outside the town of Osoyoos, a network of footpaths winds through thickets of sage and antelope brush. Braving the midday sun, a few hardy hikers – red-faced and sweating – push down the trail, leaving faint footprints in the sand and keeping an eye out for the rattlesnakes that make their home here, in Canada’s only desert. 


What awaits around the final turn in the trail must first seem illusion, a trick played on the eyes by the shimmering South Okanagan heat. Abruptly, brush gives way. Neat rows of vines rise from the desert floor, leaves interlacing into a vast and improbable tapestry of green. 


Here the path dead ends, sparse foot traffic giving way to the steady pulse of people and cars in the parking lot of Spirit Ridge Vineyard and Resort, one of a wave of new wineries and resorts to open in the South Okanagan in the last five years. In shorts and visors, visitors by the mini-busload spill into the wine shop, restaurant and wellness spa. Out back small children throng an oasis of pools, while duffers hack away on the Technicolor greens of a nine-hole course edged by sand and sagebrush just beyond. Surrounding it all, running right up to the 226 desert suites and vineyard villas at the sprawling resort, are grape vines: Pinot Blanc and Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, ripening in the summer sun. 


These are heady times for the wine industry in the South Okanagan. Over the last decade, vineyard acreage has more than doubled in the region, with some 1,940 hectares of vineyards and more than 30 wineries now stretching from Osoyoos Lake in the south to the imposing bulk of McIntyre Bluff in the north. The South Okanagan now accounts for more than 50 per cent of the wine grapes grown in B.C. and produces some of the country’s very best wines, drawing wine tourists and amenity-driven homebuyers in increasing numbers each year.


But all this bounty comes from what is, in fact, the northernmost tip of the transcontinental Great Basin Desert, a region where annual rainfall averages a miserly 25 centimetres a year, less than a quarter of Vancouver’s total. An unusually wet spring has only masked deeper water woes in the region; years of drought and shrinking winter snowpacks on the mountains have left the South Okanagan dangerously dry. And while grape vines are hardly water guzzlers – they consume less water than the orchards they replaced, for instance – the magnetic pull that vineyards exert on travellers, retirees and homebuyers has led to a tourism and recreational real estate boom, putting additional strain on already taxed water resources. With the climate edging ever hotter and the population projected to continue growing, water management and wine tourism in the South Okanagan are proving a difficult pairing. 


Among the most spectacularly parched spots in the region is the Black Sage Bench, a swath of rocky desert along the valley’s southeastern edge where Tinhorn Creek Vineyards has one of its two properties. “The worst soils in the world make the best grape growing areas,” explains Andrew Moon, Tinhorn’s 37-year-old vineyard manager. A recent émigré from Australia, Moon grew grapes for some of the largest vineyards in his home country, until a seven-year drought that started in 2003 devastated the industry. “The desert climate is ideal for winemaking,” he says. “But you’ve got to have irrigation.” 


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