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Producing wine has always been dictated by the climate, but recent extreme weather events have seen winemakers turn to nature to mitigate the effects.
Depending on your point of view, last year’s wine vintage in Europe was either a miracle or a portent of future catastrophe. Unprecedented drought and sweltering temperatures, harvests brought forward by weeks, but remarkable grape health and, generally speaking, excellent quality.
From Champagne to the Douro, from Rioja to Piedmont, the refrain from producers was similar: the vine is a tenacious plant that, with a little human assistance, can thrive when others wilt away. This seems to have been especially true of older vines with established root systems.
But it wasn’t universal.
“For us, 2022 was one of the worst vintages in the last ten years,” says the co-founder of Romania’s Cramele Recaş, Philip Cox. “It was both extremely dry, but also with volatile weather events, such as hail and torrential rain in short periods that actually caused more damage than the drought.”
At Spain’s Familia Torres, GM Miguel Torres Maczassek acknowledges the challenges of the growing season, but adds: “Given these extreme climate conditions, which will only become more common in the future, we were pleased to see how well our ancestral varieties performed, being in most cases the latest to be harvested in the regions where they are planted.” More on those ancestral varieties shortly.
It’s hard to generalise on the basis of a single harvest, but there have been enough years in the recent past with hotter and/or more erratic growing conditions to make all but the most tin-eared wine producer sit up and take notice. “The effects of climate change on viticulture, especially in the form of weather extremes, have become very evident over the last couple of years,” says Henkell Freixenet’s head of communication, Jan Rock.
“While the vine is generally a very resistant plant, continuous drought over many years will definitely have an impact. Until today, we have experienced losses in the harvest volume, but not in the taste profile.”
Trials of hybrid and new grapes – and ‘lost’ ancient varieties
In common with many other producers, Henkell Freixenet has trialled new and hybrid grape varieties in a quest to balance future resilience with quality and flavour. Meanwhile, Familia Torres has been researching resistant varieties for decades, many of them ancestral grapes almost lost to history.
“This started 40 years ago as a philanthropic project to bring back forgotten pre-phylloxera varieties out of a sort of cultural heritage responsibility,” says Torres Maczassek. “But, we realised that some of these varieties not only have great potential for winemaking, but they’re also well-adapted to climate change.”
As a result, Familia Torres is focusing on five or six ancient varieties (out of more than 50), using them in wines such as Clos Ancestral, Grans Muralles, Forcada and Pirene. However, the discovery of alternative grapes is only one potential solution – and it’s certainly no panacea.
“Given the diversity of viticulture and the changing conditions, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to giving priority to ‘new’ grape varieties,” says Rock. This view is echoed by Louisa Rose, head of winemaking at Yalumba and Australian country ambassador for International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA, a collaborative group of wineries co-founded by Torres’ father, Miguel A Torres).
Yalumba owner Hill-Smith Family Estates has its own vine propagation nursery, with Rose acknowledging that new varieties are an important part of R&D activities in Australia. “We’re always looking for new flavours and styles,” she says. “However, the ‘traditional’ varieties that we work with are still our main focus, and mostly behave well in the drier and hotter years.
“One of the varieties that we’ve been working with since the 1840s – yes, there are still vines growing that were planted back then – grenache is one of the most heat-tolerant varieties we know of, and thrives in the warmer seasons.” Torres Maczassek adds that the same grape – garnacha – is beginning to perform well in traditionally cooler areas like Penedès.
The resilience of existing grapes will be crucial in the future. At Cramele Recaş, Cox insists there is “no market” for new varieties. “I think there’s very little chance of alternative varieties being a success with customers,” he says, “unless they are already well-known and established from other regions of the world.
“About 90% of varietal wine sales are from fewer than ten varieties. Consumers at the mass-market level at least simply do not look for other varieties – and I don’t think they are going to start doing so soon. It takes decades to get a relatively new or unknown varietal on the market.”
Mulches to sunscreen – all roads lead to regenerative viticulture
Even if this was not the case, replanting vineyards is a costly and time-consuming business, so other adaptive techniques will be needed. Cramele Recaş selects new vineyard sites with ready water supplies in higher-altitude, cooler parts of the country, and is investigating intelligent irrigation systems powered by renewable energy.
Rose, meanwhile, ticks off a list of practices, including permanent grasses in the vineyards and midrows, mulches under the vines, the planting of more vegetation in and around the vineyards, changes in trellising and training to shade bunches from sunlight – even the application of kaolin ‘sunscreens’ to anticipate heatwaves.
The logical conclusion of this is regenerative viticulture, which Familia Torres has been introducing into its organic vineyards in recent years – both to mitigate the effects of climate change and to keep on producing balanced wines in the future.
Torres Maczassek explains: “In regenerative viticulture, we mimic nature as much as possible by using, among other tools, permanent ground cover, no tilling and planned grazing – following [Zimbabwean regenerative livestock farmer] Allan Savory’s holistic approach. Thanks to permanent ground cover and no tilling or ploughing of the soil, vineyards can capture atmospheric carbon dioxide and fix it in the soil.
“The implementation of regenerative viticulture also has many other benefits: it avoids erosion, retains more water as we increase carbon and organic matter in the soil, boosts microbial life and biodiversity, making a stronger ecosystem, and improves the soils to make them more resilient against climate change.”
Such practices, which organisations such as the IWCA will help to disseminate around the world, could be important safeguards against an uncertain future – a future where ‘freak’ years like 2022 may just become the norm.
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