Wine and climate change: An industry fighting back

How vintners deal with the effects of climate change?

Earlier this year, Chris Loth, the editor of The World of Fine Wines, warned, “Vines are one of the most weather-sensitive of all agricultural crops. Their ability to reflect vintage variation is, of course, a huge part of wine’s appeal. But that same expressiveness that makes a cool-vintage Bordeaux different from a warm-vintage one also makes wine particularly vulnerable to climate change.” Indeed, from France to Australia to the United States and around the world, vintners are experiencing the effects of a changing climate – elevated temperatures, spring frosts, wild fires, and wild shifts in the water cycle, from severe droughts to historic downpours – all of which play havoc on delicate grapes, making them increasingly susceptible to pests and diseases.

A shifting wine geography brings both threats and opportunities

Yet, the stakeholders in the wine industry – from vintners, to scientists, to government officials – are collectively rising to the challenge by creating new cultivation methods that will not only sustain but even improve the vines. No single effort will solve all of the vintners’ challenges. But taken as a whole, they can lead to a more sustainable and even more creative wine industry. This article reviews some of the environmental and technological efforts designed to combat climate change in wine-growing regions around the world. (For more information, see the reference list below.)

The traditional wine-growing latitudes are between 4° and 51° north and 6° and 45° south. However, the effects of climate change – mostly longer, hotter summers and warmer winters – are pushing vineyards further north and south. As a result, new wine regions are emerging in such countries as Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. In other regions – from Spain, to Italy, Argentina, and California – some winemakers are moving their vineyards to higher elevations to give their vines cooler temperatures.

Vintners are also experimenting with new grape varieties that thrive where their traditional varieties can no longer. In Austria, for instance, the famed Grüner Veltliner grape is now straining under the new conditions, but the late-ripening Furmint, one of the Tokaj grapes of Hungary, is seen as a possible replacement. Likewise, in Spain, the Familia Torres winery is working to rescue and repropagate ancient grape varieties that the phylloxera louse had all but driven to extinction. Even in Burgundy, new late-ripening grape varieties are now being considered, as long as they are allowed by the French National Institute of Origin and Quality, the public regulatory institution monitoring such designations as the appellation d'origine contrôlée in wine.

Combatting climate change with natural farming methods

In viticulture, terroir is considered a key variable of character and quality. However, the influence of terroir-specific cover crops is often overlooked, in part because they have been viewed as more or less generic ever since the mid-twentieth century, when industrial farming was on the rise. Now, viticulturalists are intent on reversing this trend by using a diverse mix of crops that are native to and thrive particularly well in specific terroirs.

Cover crops

As noted by Kathleen Wilcox in Wine Enthusiast, a good example is Château La Clotte-Cazalis in Bordeaux, France, where wine maker Marie-Pierre Lacoste found that the warming climate started to affect the aromatics of her Sauterne wines and made it difficult to maintain a proper balance between the good mold of botrytis cinerea and other, harmful molds. To keep the soil cool, reduce humidity, and better manage the molds, Lacoste successfully planted legumes and cereals as cover crops and let the grass and native plants grow wild. She also added fruit and nut trees as canopies, which enabled her to reclaim her wines’ original aromas.

In the same article, German wine maker Thomas Niedermayr of the certified organic winery Hop Gandberg in Eppan a. d. Weinstraße noted that leguminous cover crops and grasses “attract beneficial insects and provide nectar and forage, especially for bees.” He says, “While they [the cover crops] grow up to five meters high and can compete with the vine, they also absorb minerals, which are then available for the vines.”

Pests

Many fungi, such as downy mildew (Plasmopara viticola), an extremely serious fungal disease of grapes that damage the green part of the plant, can increase exponentially with climate change, because they thrive in warm and wet environments. However, there are also a few beneficial fungi that thrive under the same conditions as downy mildew but are welcome in many vineyards. In addition to botrytis cinerea, there is the mushroom-fruiting mycorrhizal fungus, which has developed a symbiotic relationship with its host plants, attaching itself to the plant’s roots and living off their carbohydrates. This, in turn, helps the roots to absorb more water, phosphorus, and other chemicals that are essential for the vines’ health. Under the right conditions, this fungus can expand a plant’s root systems as much as sevenfold.

As reported by Lauren-Johnson Wünscher in SevenFiftyDaily, Viticulturalist Michael Völker of 2naturkinder, an organic winery in Kitzingen in Bavaria, discovered its benefits after not having tilled his soil for seven years. Leaving the deeper soil layers untouched allowed the mycorrhizal fungi to flourish. Today, vintners do not have to wait for years. Instead, they can purchase mycorrhizae-nourished biofertilizers to encourage the fungus to grow.

Measuring progress with geographical mapping and data analytics

Given the many diverse mitigation efforts against climate change, vintners need to know which ones work and which ones are less effective. Until recently tracking individual vines was a tedious manual effort that resulted in bulk data without much information. Today, technologies such as Global Navigation Systems, cloud analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to provide vintners to track viruses, manage irrigation, and control vine longevity.

One solution, Vinelytics, is a cloud-based vineyard software platform that delivers real-time weather data using live sensors to track temperature, wind speed, humidity, solar radiation, rainfall, and more. The collected data, which is defined from the property, block, row, and vine level, is rolled up automatically into an intuitive dashboard which then automatically makes recommendations for spray and irrigation schedules.

Another, Sentinel Vine Manager is a Smart Phone App, available on the Apple App Store, that maps, tracks, and manages individual vine histories using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and cloud analytics, all of which can be viewed and analyzed on the mobile app. Users can map new vines, annotate metadata like viral infections and irrigation systems, and capture images in the field.

Outlook

In our changing and challenging world, therefore, the artistry and skill of the vintner is now being augmented by advances in technology, which, combined with natural approaches to farming and an adaptability to the environment, give the wine industry a fighting chance to win the battle against climate change.

In our series of articles on the effects of climate change on agriculture-based beverage raw materials, our authors Horst Dornbusch and Elva Ellen Kowald take an in-depth look at the consequences of these developments. For example, hop breeders are trying to meet the challenges of climate change in hop cultivation with new varieties.


References

• Chris Loth, “Wine and the climate crisis: Where are we now and what happens next?”, The World of Fine Wine, January 25, 2023
• Nathaniel K. Newlands, “Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics in Vineyards: A Review,” from Grapes and Wine, Antonio Morata, Editor, June 15, 2022
• Nikki Goddard, “8 Wine Regions Emerging Due to Climate Change,” Liquor.com., July 6, 2021
• Kate Dingwall, “As Climate Change Drives Up Temperatures, Winemakers Climb Higher,” Wine Enthusiast Magazine, January 16, 20230
• Aleks Zecevic, “Why Austria Is Betting on Furmint to Cope with Climate Change, “Wine Enthusiast Magazine, November 8, 2022
• Jacopo Mazzeo, “Burgundy Embraces New Varieties to Combat Climate Change,” Wine Enthusiast Magazine, April 14. 2021
• Kathleen Willcox, “The Rise of Micro-Managed Crops in the Battle Against Climate Change.” Wine Enthusiast Magazine, September 15, 2022
• Lauren Johnson-Wünscher, “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Create More Drought-Resistant Grapevines,” SevenFiftyDaily, May 15, 2023
• Samantha Cole-Johnson, “A Game Changing New Vineyard Management Technology,” SevenFiftyDaily, May 1, 2023
• www.vinelytics.com
• www.sentineltech.eu