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Enjoy Your Favorite Wine Before Climate Change Destroys It
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By Matt Simon

Science
Mar 26, 2024 12:00 PM


ENJOY YOUR FAVORITE WINE BEFORE CLIMATE CHANGE DESTROYS IT

Extreme heat and droughts are making it harder to grow grapes in many
traditional regions. Here’s how scientists are helping the industry adapt.
Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images
Save this storySave
Save this storySave

Unless you’ve got a cellar stockpiled to last you the rest of your life, climate
change is probably coming for your favorite wine. Temperature fluctuations
during the growing season create the flavors, alcohol content, and even color of
your preferred fermented grape juice—producing a beautiful ballet in a bottle.
So as global temperatures soar and water availability in many regions plummets,
the characteristics of individual wines are changing.

Up to 70 percent of today’s wine regions could be at substantial risk of losing
suitability for production if the world warms more than 2 degrees Celsius, a new
paper finds. (That’s the Paris Agreement’s absolute limit for warming above
preindustrial temperatures.) Due to ever-fiercer droughts and heat waves, 90
percent of the traditional coastal and lowland wine growing regions of Spain,
Italy, Greece, and southern California could be at existential risk by the end
of the century. Meanwhile, rising temperatures are opening up new regions to
growing, like the southern United Kingdom, as wine production generally shifts
to higher latitudes and altitudes, where it’s cooler.

“It doesn’t mean that the wine-growing disappears—and that’s an important
caveat—but it means that it can get a lot more challenging,” says viticulturist
Greg Gambetta of Bordeaux Sciences Agro and the Institute of Science of Vine and
Wine, lead author of the review paper, publishing today in Nature Reviews Earth
and Environment. “There’s actually a lot of room for adaptation for wine
growers—if the warming is limited. This is true for most regions.”



Still, climate change will make wine-making increasingly difficult in many
places. The paper notes that by the end of this century, the net suitable area
for wine production in California could decline by up to 50 percent. The
suitable area across Europe’s traditional wine-producing regions could fall by
20 to 70 percent, depending on how much warming we end up with. Up to 65 percent
of Australia's traditional vineyards might become unsuitable.

As temperatures rise, a grape plant reacts in complex ways. “You need a degree
of heat to get through the ripening phase, to get sugar accumulation, and then
also get the ideal amount of development of some of these secondary compounds
like anthocyanins and tannins—all the things that make wine exciting and
interesting and have good mouthfeel,” says Elisabeth Forrestel, a viticulturist
and ecologist at UC Davis who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “It’s when you
exceed certain temperatures that it becomes problematic for the grapes.”



Intense and persistent heat waves, for instance, can sunburn the fruit, greatly
reducing its quality. But before that, higher temperatures desiccate the grapes,
concentrating the sugars. The more sugar, the higher the alcohol content. If
you’re drinking wine to get drunk, climate change will make wines more efficient
for you, sure enough. “Depending on who you are, where you come from, this can
be a bad thing,” says Gambetta. “If you have a region that’s always defined a
style in a certain way, then that’s going to change the wine.”

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More subtly, heat influences volatile compounds that turn into gas—that’s the
“nose” you get when tasting wine—which break down under higher temperatures.
“The profiles tend to get pushed to what sensory scientists would call the
‘cooked’ side of the spectrum: more jammy, or like cooked fruit,” says Gambetta.
“This can be a good thing. Some people like wines like this and it’s fine. So it
all has to do with the identity of a region.”



The ideal climate for winemaking is warm days and cool nights, with conditions
heating and cooling the grapes. But climate change is altering that cycle in
dramatic ways. “It’s actually the nights that are warming faster than the days,”
says Forrestel. “You don’t get the cooling of the fruit in the nighttime. And
then when you exceed ideal temperatures during the day, you actually have
degradation of a lot of the compounds that are important.”



Even in the absence of drought, higher temperatures make the plants lose more
water. That, in turn, reduces the yield of grapes, meaning a winemaker would end
up with less juice to work with. Paired with drought, yields decline even
further. “You take Bordeaux, where I work, the rainfall has been pretty steady
if you look over the past 100 years,” Gambetta says. “But the fact that the
temperatures are going up and up and up, that drives more water use out of the
agricultural system.”

Vineyards can also receive too much water. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold
more moisture, which is supercharging rainstorms, hence the catastrophic
flooding we’re already seeing around the world. If too much rainwater sits in a
vineyard for too long, it deprives the vines’ roots of oxygen.

Still, the grape plant is surprisingly hardy: Without supplemental irrigation,
typical Mediterranean varieties like grenache can churn out good yields and make
good wines with as little as 14 inches of rain a year. A vine might be able to
ride out a drought with lower yields, or by dropping its leaves, known as
defoliation. That won’t kill the vine itself, so it can bounce back once rains
return.

But as climate change makes droughts more common and more intense, some
winemaking regions are feeling the strain. “In 2022, which was outrageous by all
definitions in Europe—in Portugal, and parts of Spain—they had seriously stunted
vines, defoliated vines,” says Gambetta. “Then you can get into this dangerous
territory where you have not only really catastrophic effects that season, but
you can get carryover effects to subsequent seasons.”

To adapt, vineyards can of course begin irrigating. But that comes with added
costs, and potentially puts strains on local freshwater supplies: If drought has
gripped a region, everyone else is going to need more water, too. And even then,
the plants will have to contend with Europe’s intensifying heat waves.

Another option is for vineyards to shift north as the climate warms. Indeed, the
new paper notes that in the northerly regions of Europe and North America,
suitable land for winemaking could increase between 80 to 200 percent, depending
on the amount of eventual warming. Winemaking is now booming in the southern UK,
for instance, as well as in Oregon and Washington state in the US.

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But that’s no guarantee that climate change won’t make a mess of operations in
those territories as well: The Pacific Northwest has in recent years been
wilting under extraordinary heat waves, with temperatures climbing above 110
degrees Fahrenheit for days at a time. The West Coast’s increasingly massive
wildfires are also smothering vineyards in smoke, tainting wines: Campfire
flavors are for smores, not merlots.

At the same time, other supply chain hiccups are conspiring with climate change
to drive up the price of your favorite wine. Corks come from the bark of cork
trees, which is repeatedly harvested over the lifetime of the plant. But during
droughts, the trees dry out too much for crews to peel off the bark without
killing them. The wine industry has also been grappling with rising prices of
the glass used to make bottles.



To help winemakers adapt, scientists are experimenting with different tricks to
cool the plants. Cover crops growing under the grapes help cool the fruit, for
instance. “If you have bare soils on your vineyard floor, you get a lot of
re-radiation—your soils heat up a lot and then reflect heat back into the
canopy,” says Forrestel. “I think we’re just beginning to understand the impacts
of some of these truly extreme events because they’re more recent, and becoming
more frequent.”

While winegrowers can’t change the weather, they can change their plants.
Reducing the amount of leaf biomass reduces the amount of water the plant loses
in a heat wave, and “canopy management” can guide the remaining leaves to more
purposefully shade the berries from the sun. And winegrowers are already
experimenting with different varieties of grape, especially those known to be
drought- and heat-tolerant, in different regions. Developing varieties that have
deeper root systems means the plants can tap into water deeper in the soil.

“Changing the variety is a huge, huge lever, because varieties have huge
variation in how they behave,” says Gambetta. But that’s easier said than done.
In Bordeaux, there’s a long history of exceptional wines—a long history that has
until now unfolded across a fairly stable climate. They’ve done massive studies
on new varieties. “But if you look at: Has there been an uptake? Do growers
change? The answer is clearly no, they don’t,” says Gambetta. “They can’t
necessarily just make this brand new wine and go, ‘Hey, listen, here’s my new
wine,’ and it’s gonna sell like hotcakes. Because whole regions are based on
these identities.”

This is the inherent contradiction of the grape. Winemakers pride themselves on
a consistent product that loyal customers demand. But the grape plant is
actually a hardy crop that can withstand change—that’s why it can grow all
across the planet, from Bordeaux to Napa, on down to Chile and South Africa. “It
just is a plant that has a huge swath of climates that it grows within,” says
Gambetta. “But it doesn’t mean that climate change is not going to present
serious challenges, especially to these traditional winegrowing regions.”






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Matt Simon is a senior staff writer covering biology, robotics, and the
environment. He’s the author, most recently, of A Poison Like No Other: How
Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.
Staff Writer
 * X

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