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Viniculture and climate change

Source:Ringier Food Release Date:2018-02-20 129
Food & Beverage
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From Europe to China,  how is climate change impacting the way wineries manage vineyards and produce wines?

THE effects of climate change have made us to some extent more resilient, adaptable, and creative.  In the world of winery, people can tell you climate change is more apparent year after year. Continued warming has pushed harvest dates forward for wineries in California, Europe, Australia and South America. But that’s not all.

It will come to a point when wine-growing regions could be moving south- and northward, whilst others near the equator could be totally lost, said Dr James Daniell of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) who, together with European and Australian researchers studied the effects of natural disasters on the global wine industry. It sounds unthinkable since wines rely on terroir, but there’s a silver lining it seems, as wines might actually improve.

“The English, Canadian, and Northern China wine regions will likely increase production markedly and continue to improve their market share and quality of production,” predicts Dr Daniell. This is where adapting becomes the key. Climate change is a given, and for the industry to continue, wineries have to consider changing grape varieties and harvest times. According to Dr Daniell wineries could profit from new grape strains, new technologies to boost production and to reduce damage from biological pathogens and insects, and new methods to overcome extreme weather events.

(Dream Stock Photos)

Grow other grape varieties

Elizabeth Wolkovich, an Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, agrees that as temperatures soar, winemakers have to look beyond the tradition grape varieties and plant lesser known ones.

In a paper presented in Nature Climate Change (January 2018), Ms Wolkovich also said scientists and vintners must have a better understanding of how grape varieties adapt to different climates.

“It’s going to be very hard, given the amount of warming we’ve already committed to...for many regions to continue growing the exact varieties they’ve grown in the past,” Wolkovich said in a news release. “But what we’re interested in talking about is how much more diversity of grape varieties do we have, and could we potentially be using that diversity to adapt to climate change.

“The Old World has a huge diversity of winegrapes – there are over planted 1,000 varieties – and some of them are better adapted to hotter climates and have higher drought tolerance than the 12 varieties now making up over 80% of the wine market in many countries,” she said. “We should be studying and exploring these varieties to prepare for climate change.”

Oh, terroir

Easier said than done – vintners are not sold to changing grape varieties, it seems, because a wine’s unique flavour is dependent on the terroir, or the complete natural environment where a wine is produced. Soil, location, and climate have much to do with the flavours.  Only certain traditional or existing varieties are part of each terroir.

“There’s a real issue in the premier wine-growing regions that historical terroir is what makes great wine, and if you acknowledge in any way that you have climate change, you acknowledge that your terroir is changing,” Wolkovich said. “So in many of those regions there is not much of an appetite to talk about changing varieties.”

However, there is not enough research data to say whether other varieties would be able to adapt to climate change.

“Right now we know we have this diversity, but we have little information on how to use it. One of our other suggestions is for growers to start setting aside parts of vineyards to grow some other varieties to see which ones are working,”said Ignacio Morales-Castilla, a co-author of the study. She is also a Fellow at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University who investigates which winegrape varieties will mature well under climate change.

The hurdles to transition

Knowing and understanding grape varieties is one, but transitioning has its own hurdles, said Ms Wolkovich.

In Europe, there are well over 1,000 grape varieties, and research repositories that study the diversity and cultivation. The hurdle would be the labeling laws that restrict on how to take advantage of the rich diversity. Ms Wolkovich gives the example of three grape varieties that can be labeled as Champagne or four for Burgundy. Similar restrictions have been enacted in many European regions – all of which force growers to focus on a small handful of grape varieties.

“The more you are locked into what you have to grow, the less room you have to adapt to climate change,” Wolkovich said. “So there’s this big pool of knowledge, and massive diversity, growers have maintained an amazing amount of genetic and climactic response diversity...but if they changed those laws in any way in relation to climate change, that’s acknowledging that the terroir of the region is changing, and many growers don’t want to do that.”

The opposite is true for New World winegrowers who have in their hands diverse grape varieties that could be adaptable to climate change. There are no laws that restrict cultivation, but winegrowers have little information about how to grow them.

Just 12 varieties account for more than 80% of the grapes grown in Australian vineyards, more than 75% of all the grapes grown in China are Cabernet Sauvignon – and the chief reason why has to do with consumers.

“They have all the freedom in the world to import new varieties and think about how to make great wines from a grape variety you’ve never heard of, but they’re not doing it because the consumer hasn’t heard of it,” Ms Wolkovich said. “In Europe, people do blend wines...but in the New World, we’ve gotten really focused on specific varieties: ‘I want a bottle of Pinot Noir,’ or ‘I want a bottle of Cabernet.’

“We’ve been taught to recognise the varieties we think we like,” she said. “People buy Pinot even though it can taste totally different depending on where it’s grown. It might taste absolutely awful from certain regions, but if you think you like Pinot, you’re only buying that.”

As Wolkovich sees it, wine producers now face a choice: proactively experiment with new varieties, or risk suffering the negative consequences of climate change.

“With continued climate change, certain varieties in certain regions will start to fail -- that’s my expectation,” she said. “The solution we’re offering is how do you start thinking of varietal diversity. Maybe the grapes grown widely today were the ones that are easiest to grow and tasted the best in historical climates, but I think we’re missing a lot of great grapes better suited for the future.”

References:

Harvard University. “A changing climate, changing wine: To adapt to warmer temperatures, winemakers may have to plant lesser known grape varieties, study suggests.” ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180102114149.htm (accessed February 19, 2018).

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). “Winemakers lose billions of dollars every year due to natural disasters: Scientists develop global risk index for wine regions -- climate change has positive and negative effects on wine industry.” ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170427112226.htm (accessed February 19, 2018)

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