Shifting Tastes:

How Climate Change is Transforming Alberta's Food and Wine Scene

BY LAUREN KALINOWSKI

The Abrupt Reality of Climate Change on Our Plates and in Our Glasses

The January 2024 polar vortex that annihilated 99 percent of British Columbia's wine vintage. Smoke tainted California wines that taste “as smoky as mezcal.” Lettuce prices spiking from $2 to $9 overnight. This isn't some apocalyptic food forecast. It's Alberta's current culinary reality.

Climate change isn't just melting ice caps somewhere far away. It's reshaping what's on your plate tonight and what's in your glass right now. “It's not gradual. It's abrupt,” declares Scott Downey, chef and restaurateur behind Edmonton's The Marc and The Butternut Tree. “These environmental impacts happen immediately, and people need to figure it out.”

As extreme weather events intensify and seasonal patterns shift, Alberta's food scene is being forced into a radical reinvention. From restaurant menus changing on a dime to surprising new crops flourishing in our own backyard, the map of what we eat and drink is being redrawn by forces greater than tradition or taste.

The Polar Vortex That Crushed BC Wine

In January 2024, disaster struck British Columbia's wine industry when temperatures plummeted to -28° C for nearly a week, destroying virtually an entire year's crop in a matter of days. “The 2024 vintage was almost entirely destroyed,” explains Jon Elson of SBSW Wine Imports. “There's a very important temperature threshold of -23 degrees where, if vines are starting to go through their cycles, the cold will definitely kill the fruit and arguably could kill the vine.”

The timing couldn't have been worse. January is when BC's vines begin emerging from dormancy to start their growth cycle. “They might not be flowering, but they will start to see some bud break and things like that,” Elson adds. When the polar vortex hit, the vines' early growth was fatally damaged.

This climate disaster forced an unprecedented response: the BC government relaxed regulations to allow wineries to use American fruit while maintaining their VQA status.

“Almost entirely, with probably a few exceptions, the 2024 vintage of BC wine will actually be from Washington, Oregon, or California,” says Elson. For premium wineries focused on terroir and estate grown grapes, the situation represents an existential crisis. Downey witnessed the impact firsthand when visiting the Okanagan during harvest season.

“We only saw grapes on one single vineyard. We only saw one time people actually making wine. And it was harvest season. It's usually chaos,” Downey recalls. “They said they have grapes on the vines, but they can't make wine with them. They're leaving them up so it looks nice, but that's it.”

The recovery will be painfully slow. While some vineyards, like Dirty Laundry Winery, were fortunate to lose only a small portion of their vines, others lost significant portions of their vineyards. At Gray Monk, some of the oldest vines in Canada at 25-30 years old, were completely destroyed. New vines take five to seven years before they produce quality wine grapes, and as Elson explains, “The wines will drink differently with that lack of maturity on the vines.” The 2024 polar vortex won't just affect this year's wines. Its impact will be felt for the better part of a decade.

FIRE, SMOKE, AND TAINTED WINE

Another climate extreme affecting the wine Albertans drink, is smoke. California, traditionally one of the province's top sources for imported wine, has been battling wildfires that create “smoke taint” in grapes. “If you look at the 2020 vintage, specifically in Napa Valley, the fires led to a level of smoke taint that pretty much rendered the vintage obsolete,” says Elson.

This smoke taint doesn't come from vineyards burning down, but from grapes absorbing smoke compounds from nearby fires. The result can be undrinkable. “We opened a bottle of Albariño from Stag's Leap Winery the other day,” Downey shares. “It was so smoky, almost like mezcal — heavily affected by smoke and remarkably intense.” Rather than discard the wine, Downey's team found a creative solution. They paired it with a bison tartare, removing the dish's normal smoked components and using the wine's smoky character as an educational opportunity about climate impacts.

THE RESTAURANTS' SCRAMBLE

For restaurants, climate change means constant adaptation. The impacts aren't theoretical; they're immediate and demanding, often requiring complete menu rewrites overnight. “We get a message saying, ‘Okay, that head of romaine used to be $2 and it's now $9,’” Downey explains. “Whenever there's a disaster or extreme shift, it's not gradual. It's basically, ‘This is starting next week.’”

These abrupt changes force difficult decisions. Do restaurants absorb the cost, raise prices, or pivot to different ingredients? For Downey's restaurants, the approach depends on the venue.

“The Butternut Tree is this ever changing ecosystem where the menu is fluid,” he says. This flexibility allows them to adapt when ingredients become unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

But established restaurants with signature dishes face greater challenges. “At The Marc, the steak and the frites are always the same. If something happened to arugula or the potato that the fries are made from, we'd have to figure out how to pivot while maintaining what people expect.”

ALBERTA'S CHANGING GROWING SEASON: New Opportunities

Climate shifts are also transforming what can be grown locally, creating unexpected bright spots in an otherwise challenging landscape. Alberta's growing season is extending and intensifying in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. “We used to have a week or two that were really hot, and now it's more like a month that's really hot,” Downey observes. “We're heading to temperatures in the 40s, which is unusual.”

This heat is enabling crops previously impossible in Alberta's climate. Peppers and chilies, once rare specialty items, are now thriving. “In the first few years at The Butternut Tree, we couldn't really do chilies. You could get jalapeños from some greenhouses, but things with capsaicin and heat were hard to get,” Downey describes. “Now if you go to a farmers market in August, there's tons of options.”

Even more surprisingly, exotic fruits are appearing in Alberta's agricultural landscape. “If you go to Prairie Gardens in the summer, you'll find fig trees growing in their greenhouses and producing fruit,” Downey adds. “It's abnormal. I would never have said Alberta is a place you could grow a fig. But here we are.”

In the Okanagan, similar shifts are occurring. “Steve & Dan's started selling kiwis three or four years ago,” Downey mentions. The changing climate in southern BC now supports these subtropical crops, as winter temperatures rarely drop below the critical -15° C threshold that would kill the plants, at least until the anomalous polar vortex of January 2024.

Amid these changes, some wild foods are actually thriving due to climatedriven events. “Morels love to grow after a forest fire,” Downey explains. “The morel seasons have been very good the last couple years. It's probably literally the only positive out of it all.” As forest fires have become more frequent across western Canada, these prized mushrooms have appeared in greater abundance, creating an unexpected silver lining for foragers and chefs.

For local growers, these changes represent both opportunity and uncertainty. “It's the smart people, the people growing, who say, ‘Great, let's grow kiwis. Let's explore that,'” says Downey. “Because for every new thing that we add, there's for sure one thing that doesn't do as well.”

LOOKING FORWARD: Adaptation in a Changing Climate

These changing growing conditions reflect a broader transformation in Alberta's food and wine landscape, one that requires continuous adaptation and innovation. Hybrid grape varieties, engineered to withstand temperature extremes, are gaining prominence in the wine industry. Elson points to coldhardy grape varieties now being planted in cooler Canadian wine regions as one example of this adaptation.

Traditional wine regions worldwide are making similar adjustments. “In the Rhône Valley in France, there are examples of wineries giving up their AOC [protected designation] to grow different kinds of grapes,” Elson says. These wineries are sacrificing their prestigious geographical designations to plant varieties better suited to warming temperatures. For wine lovers, this means exploring new varietals and regions. Canadian wineries in areas once considered too cold for quality viticulture are finding opportunity in adversity.

In Alberta's restaurant scene, chefs are developing creative ways to maintain their vision while adapting to volatile supplies. For Downey, communication is key. “We have a lot of very young professionals. We just try to educate them on why something changed, so when it comes to the table, our staff can articulate to guests why we had to change this.”

This transparency extends to innovative approaches like Downey's pairing of smoke-affected wine with bison tartare, turning climate challenges into educational opportunities for diners.

The dining public will see these changes reflected in both availability and pricing. Seasonal menus will likely become more common as fixed menus become increasingly difficult to maintain year-round. Even iconic dishes may need to evolve. Meanwhile, Alberta's farmers and growers are experimenting with crops once unthinkable in our northern climate. The appearance of figs, kiwis, and a wider variety of peppers represents just the beginning of this agricultural transformation.

Climate change is already reshaping what we eat and drink in ways both challenging and unexpected. Yet amid the disruption, Alberta's food community is responding with creativity and resilience. As Downey puts it: “I think between both restaurants, we have a lot of people with a lot of passions in their life. We just try to educate them on why things change.” In an era of climate uncertainty, this spirit of education, adaptation, and innovation may be the most important ingredient of all.

As we look ahead, this adaptive approach will likely become the new normal for Alberta's food scene. For consumers, this means embracing seasonality, appreciating what's available when it's available, and perhaps discovering new favourites along the way. While climate change disrupts traditional patterns, it also creates opportunities for new tastes and experiences that may ultimately enrich our local food culture. Resilience, after all, comes not from resistance to change, but from the ability to adapt with it.

ALBERTA'S CHANGING SEASONAL CALENDAR:

What You'll Find at Farmers' Markets

SEPTEMBER:

ABUNDANCE & DISRUPTION

● Peak season for most vegetables

● Widest variety of the year

● Greenhouse figs beginning to appear

● Also prime time for supply chain issues

"September is almost overwhelming because finally everything you could ever want is available"

— Scott Downey

EXTENDED SEASONS:

● Mushroom season extending from traditional October end into December

● More greenhouse-grown exotics appearing (figs, experimental crops)

"Mushroom seasons used to end in October. Rarely, sometimes we'd get mushrooms coming out of BC in November... But we were getting chanterelles almost to Christmas last year" — Scott Downey