The growers adapting tradition to a changing valley
A seasonal series from orchards, vineyards and farms across the Okanagan.
The Rieslings came off the bench three weeks early this year, which the winemaker in question — third generation, trained in Geisenheim, back home by choice — marks in her ledger without comment, because the ledger has said some version of it for a decade.
Field Notes, the series this dispatch opens, will spend a year with a dozen Okanagan growing families as they adapt: the orchardists grafting to varieties their parents considered exotic; the vineyard rethinking rootstock for heat the textbooks call Mediterranean; the vegetable farm whose season now starts under row cover in February and ends in a November that no longer reliably freezes.
The adaptations are technical, but the series' interest is cultural. Farming families hold land through change by revising practice while conserving identity — a negotiation, conducted at kitchen tables, about which parts of tradition are the point and which parts were only ever method.
The series runs monthly with the seasons. It begins where the valley's year does: in the pruning weeks, when next year's crop is decided with hand shears, one deliberate cut at a time.
