Climate change and the wine industry
As if deadly storms, droughts, and rising tides weren’t enough to worry about, climate change is coming for your cote du rhone and cabernet too.
Rising temperatures are threatening the way that winemakers have been growing grapes and producing wine for centuries. Higher temperatures and drier climates increase the sugar content in grapes which converts to alcohol in fermentation. Wine makers must harvest earlier (with some producers bumping up their harvests by as many as 4 weeks), sacrificing the complexity that would develop on the vine in order to maintain acceptable levels of alcohol. This type of change is nearly existential to some types of wine, where the slightest modification in production can have an outsized effect on taste and quality. Warmer climates are also more hospitable to pests that prey on vineyards and we are likely to see the occurrence of crop wipeouts increase with climate change as well.
Randall Grahm, founder of Bonny Doon Vineyard and a leader in the American wine industry, spoke about the effect of climate change on the wine industry in an interview with the New Yorker: “It’s everywhere. Burgundy may be fucked. The northern Rhône Valley is partly fucked, though many of the great vineyards face away from the sun. The southern Rhône is completely fucked.”
Current action to handle climate change in the wine industry
Wine makers are beginning to confront the reality of climate change and are adapting their production methods at a cost. The Adapting Viticulture to Climate Change (ADVICLIM) project lays out potential mitigation strategies for the short, medium and long term (shown below). Short term strategies focus on agricultural methods that delay the ripening of grapes and mitigate sugar content. In the medium term, wine producers can choose different growing sites within their region and rootstock for their grape varieties. In the long term, growers will need to implement novel irrigation tactics and choose grape varieties better adapted to the changing climate.
Source: Adviclim
Randall Grahm, has taken this long-term strategy a step further. He recently purchased 280 acres of land in California to create a lab of sorts where he plans to run hybridization experiments with the goal of developing new grape varietals that are resistant to drought, pests and heat. He said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times, “What we’re trying to do is model a kind of sustainability for a very challenged planet.” Grahm’s approach is one of the most proactive examples we’ve seen from the industry.
While many of the oldest wine producing regions will become inhospitable to grapevines, as the planet warms, it is possible that new areas may become attractive for wine production. In England, for example, there has been considerable hype around the potential for the British wine industry to bloom with climate change. This optimism, however, tends to ignore the fact that with warmer climate comes harsher weather, dryer summers, and frequent storms.
Extra action required
While there has been much talk about the threat that climate change poses to traditional wine production methods, the lens is rarely flipped. Wine producers should work to implement more sustainable methods like water conservation and using renewable energy sources.
The regulatory bodies that govern wine appellation will also need to adapt. As alcohol levels increase and some grape varietals become increasingly difficult to produce, classifications may need to be adjusted. From a proactive stand, these regulatory bodies can also incentivize sustainable production practices, as the California Sustainable Winegrowing Program does, for example.
Here’s hoping that wine producers embrace climate change mitigation, so we can sip on syrah as we hurdle towards human extinction.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRwVFGjlOwU
https://winesvinesanalytics.com/features/article/195134/How-Climate-Change-Affects-Winegrowing
https://www.wineinstitute.org/initiatives/sustainablewinegrowing
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/a-vintners-quest-to-create-a-truly-american-wine
https://www.carbonbrief.org/is-climate-change-good-news-for-the-uk-wine-industry
http://www.adviclim.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/B1-deliverable.pdf
Really interesting blog, and liked the point about shifting the focus back to the wine industry itself. It would be interesting to see if there’s anything they could learn from alcohol production in other industries – e.g. https://www.diageo.com/en/in-society/reducing-our-environmental-impact/ . While of course these are very different production methods, there may well be some cross-relevance of ideas
This is what we’ve seen in many industries, the consumers don’t seem to be aware of how climate change is impacting their favorite glass of Chardonnay or Merlot. The wine makers should do a better job in educating the consumers on this change and for those who are implementing more environmentally friendly production methods, they should widely promote it. Also, what is the industry doing about packaging? Is there a greener container than wine bottles and corks/plastic corks out there?
Before reading this post, I had never thought about the impact of climate change on wine production. Shame on me – but thanks for bringing it up, folks! Now I wonder how do major wine producers plan to react to such a bleak prospect. Are they moving to new regions? Investing in new grape varieties? Or maybe just increasing the resilience of current varieties?
I particularly love the last line of this post! I wonder whether the shift here, like in so many industries, will be such that only expensive, very high margin wine can claim to be eco-friendly? Will there necessarily be a cost-environmental impact – quality of taste trade off? I hope I can still afford (green) wine in the future…
This is interesting! I also didn’t know that climate change was affecting wine producers. It makes me wonder pseudo-vineyards that use greenhouses to produce grape varietals could emerge in the future. Though, this would likely result in increased costs and capped production, it could ensure the survival of specific grape varietals.
Pretty insightful post. In the long-term, it seems that the actual industry and the current varieties of wines, as we currently know them, may not exist anymore. This would imply developing a new customer base whose tastes are different to the current ones, opening new opportunities, but at the same time it would be interesting to know what would happen to traditional wine drinkers…