BC Wineries: Sour Grapes
The once sleepy town of Naramata used to be B.C.’s fruit basket. But as orchards are torn up and replaced with vineyards and multimillion-dollar homes, residents wonder whether a way of living is being lost – and their proud history erased.
Coming home to Naramata will never be the same. For 25 years, I’ve been making the pilgrimage back to visit my father, Pat Clarke, and the lush, rolling benchlands north of Penticton. I spent a decade of my childhood in Naramata, a storybook upbringing that revolved around living and working on the nine-hectare farm my father bought back in 1974. Dad sold his last parcel of working orchard 15 years ago – trading the stress of being a heavily indebted fruit farmer for a life of building housing (including the retirement complex he now calls home). But the 16-kilometre drive north from Penticton still takes me straight back to those carefree days, and whenever possible I plan my visits for blossom time in late April or early May, just to savour the sight of the benchlands covered in a vast carpet of flowering fruit trees.
But in the spring of 2008, I have to search the horizon for a glimpse of an apple block in bloom. In the three years since my last visit, so many fruit trees have been chopped down and replaced by vineyards that I barely recognize the place. Instead of a sea of blossoms, the remaining orchards are scattered about like flowering oases in a desert of pressure-treated posts, tightly strung wire and gnarled, leafless grapevines. It’s as if someone tore the patches off my grandmother’s favourite quilt but left a few behind for memory’s sake.
On one level, Naramata’s disappearing fruit trees are a symptom of the community’s new-found prosperity, driven by the burgeoning wine industry and the large amounts of outside investment it has attracted in recent years. When I was a kid in the late ’70s, locally made wine came in four-litre screw-top jugs, and there wasn’t a single cottage winery in Naramata. Now more than two dozen wineries dot the benchlands north of Penticton, most of them built in the last decade.
In part, the change is being driven by simple math. An acre of apple orchard can produce about $6,000 in any given crop year, about the same as 10 years ago (although some newer high-density varieties can boost that to $8,000). Wine grapes, on the other hand, can yield more than $10,000 an acre, or more for specialty varieties and exceptional vintages. Vineyards are not only more profitable and predictable than traditional crops such as apples and pears – which still make up more than 90 per cent of the valley’s tree-fruit tonnage – they’re easier to maintain, require fewer pesticides, need less water and yield a value-added commodity with a long shelf life.
But the rapid shift away from fruit trees is also a function of soaring property values that are forcing farmers to squeeze the highest possible return out of each acre of land.
An acre of orchard that was worth $30,000 a decade ago now sells for about $160,000 (an estimate that depends as much on the quality of the view as the quality of soil); the price of an acre of vineyard has gone from $30,000 to upwards of $200,000 over the same time period. Converting an acre of orchard land to vineyard only costs $25,000, but automatically increases the value of the land by $40,000 – an equity-building opportunity that’s too attractive for many landowners to resist.
Among the first wave of new winemakers to arrive in Naramata were Beat and Prudence Mahrer, a Swiss couple who started the well-known Red Rooster label in 1990. Red Rooster’s first crops were grown on a 4½-hectare parcel of apple orchard my dad sold to the Mahrers for about $300,000. After converting the land to grapes and building up their successful winery, the couple sold the same parcel in 2003 for $1.6 million.
Cruising the old neighbourhood one morning, my dad and I run into Beat Mahrer. The two men exchange the usual quips about how much the Mahrers made reselling the old orchard. As usual, Mahrer laughs a little harder than my dad. “A winery is a good long-term investment in real estate that pays you a pretty good return along the way,” Beat says. “And what you don’t sell this year is more valuable next year.”
For decades Naramata had been a well-kept secret, the kind of place most people found by word of mouth. But its new reputation as a wine-growing region has bestowed a touch of celebrity cachet on the once-sleepy village. Back in 2006, Canadian actor Jason Priestley and veteran broadcaster Terry David Mulligan hosted a TV show called Hollywood and Vines, filmed in part at three Naramata wineries – La Frenz, Poplar Grove and Joie. Last July Mulligan bought a house on the Naramata benchlands and launched a new radio program focusing on Okanagan food and wine, while Priestley has since invested in Oliver’s Black Hills Estate Winery.
For the most part, though, the new face of Naramata belongs to lesser-known baby boomers who have purchased farms on the benchlands with dreams of retiring to a simple rural lifestyle, says Julius Bloomfield, manager of ReMax Front Street in Penticton. “Many of the buyers are coming out of the money markets in major centres, mostly Vancouver and Calgary. Their dream is to have a working vineyard. If you got them all in a room and said, ‘Hands up if you were a stock broker in Vancouver,’ I bet you half the hands would go up.” One of the attractions of Naramata is the abundance of five- to 10-acre parcels, divided by prudent farmers in the years prior to the agricultural land reserve. “The prime size is five acres,” says Bloomfield, who has sold dozens of Naramata acreages over the last decade. “It doesn’t matter if it has a house or not. They’re probably going to rebuild anyway.”
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