This article was initially published in the March issue of Global Drinks Intel magazine. For details on how to subscribe click here.
Drought and heatwaves drove early wine harvests in Europe last year – but also brought climate-related challenges into sharper focus.
The remarkable heat and drought conditions experienced in Europe last summer have further focused the minds of the wine industry on climate change, its impact on production, and what to do, both to adapt to it and to stop it getting even worse.
“This year has been a challenge in many aspects,” says Victoria González Gordon, chief sustainability officer at Spain’s González Byass. In 2022, the earliest harvest start dates in history were recorded by Beronia in Rioja, González Byass in Jerez, Vilarnau in Cava, Viñas del Vero in Somontano, Finca Moncloa in Cádiz and Finca Constancia in Castilla.
The result of the real-world impact of climate change is an unprecedented interest in sustainability among wine producers. Since its launch in 2019, the International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA) organisation has attracted almost 40 members from around the world.
“Whether it’s increasing temperatures in France and Spain, wildfires and flooding in California, or intensified monsoons in India, the necessity to combat the effect of changing climatic conditions is now palpable,” says IWCA executive director Charlotte Hey. “We can see how warmer winters and cold snaps can decimate a harvest, which in turn leads to shortages in supply – this has a real effect on businesses in the short term.”
Redefining which wines are produced where
But the shifting climate has more than a merely economic impact. “If we look at these [climatic] factors alone, producers are navigating unreliable crops and significant changes to terroir, which is redefining what they produce and how it tastes,” says Paul Braydon, head of buying at UK-based supplier Kingsland Drinks Group.
“These conditions also demand more management and more investment; they’re compensating with more water, for example, with increased demands for irrigation. If temperatures continue to soar, the industry will need to look towards cooler climates or regions currently considered more marginal. In real terms, this could be a shift from south-eastern Australia to Tasmania, or from Burgundy to England.”
This represents a huge issue for wineries today, as Mafalda Guedes, corporate brand & communications manager at Portuguese group Sogrape, acknowledges. “Even though mitigation is an obligation, the greatest challenge is adaptation,” she says, reeling off a lengthy list of practical measures that the company has undertaken: weather monitoring sensors in the vineyards; protective covers to shield grapes from sunburn; high-precision irrigation; vineyard ecosystem management; trials of heat- and drought-tolerant grape varieties; experimentation with different vine training systems.
Adapting to changes is key
“There’s no doubt that we have to look for ways in which we can adapt our vineyards to climate change, given our reliance on the soil and the land where we grow our grapes,” says González Gordon. “At González Byass, we are investigating how we can best help them to adapt by studying more resilient varietals, changing our planting methods, and reducing – and being more effective with – water usage.”
This is a general theme observed across members of the IWCA, adds Hey. “If you’re involved in wine production, it’s very difficult to ignore the reality of climate change and the effects it is having across all growing regions. Wineries are adapting to the extreme and changeable conditions throughout each growing season and, as a result, climate actions via reducing emissions and employing regenerative farming methods are top priorities for any wine-producing business with a meaningful long-term plan.”
Those plans encompass short-term, practical vineyard management, as well as longer-term sustainability efforts. “It’s really important to look at sustainability as a whole and incorporate best practice at all levels of the business,” says Andrés Valero, sustainability & CSR leader at Argentina’s Grupo Avinea, owner of Bodegas Argento and Otronia.
“Sustainable vineyard management and winemaking practices are obvious areas of focus, but these need to be considered alongside other key issues, such as reducing carbon footprint, tackling energy and waste reductions, and providing fair and safe environments for our community and workforce.”
For Grupo Avinea, practical measures have included the development of Matrizviva, a programme of agricultural research partnerships with public institutions, such as one with the Argentinian National Agricultural Technology Institute to analyse the biodiversity of arthropods in Argento’s Agrelo vineyard.
Meanwhile, the bottle for the company’s Argento Estate Reserve Organic Fairtrade Malbec has seen a weight reduction from 590g to 400g, cutting CO2 emissions by 55%, with 99% of the packaging now recyclable.
Supply chain focus
Sustainability has to permeate the entire supply chain. “All companies that are linked with the wine industry need to ensure better practices in all their supply chains,” says Nuno Silva, marketing manager at cork supplier MA Silva. “At the same time, companies are facing tremendous impacts in prices for all supply chain needs.”
Silva believes that the need to balance these two factors is leading producers back to the use of natural cork stoppers. He highlights a KPMG International study that concluded natural cork stoppers can offset the carbon footprint of a glass bottle, with a standard cork retaining up to 267.7g of CO2 (589.2g for a sparkling wine cork, 323.3g for a micro-agglomerated cork).
Across the industry, multiple initiatives aim to improve wine’s sustainability record, from alternative packaging concepts to the pioneering use by Kingsland of bulk flexi-containers to ship wine for in-market bottling, which Braydon says results in a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions per bottle.
Communication & consensus
Binding all these strategies together – and communicating them to the rest of the industry – remains a challenge, and one that Hey and the IWCA are working hard to address. Yet this kind of collective thinking has not always been a strength in the wine industry, according to the co-founder of Romanian winery Cramele Recas, Philip Cox.
“Generally speaking, our industry is always quite slow to react to problems,” he says. “However, the recent run of extreme weather events in many countries, which seem to be getting worse each year, has for sure attracted the attention of many winemakers. Still, there is no real consensus on what to do about it.”
Adaptation and mitigation also require long-term investment – not easy for an industry with typical slim profit margins. “The consequences [of climate change] will be – if not already – felt right through the supply chain, ultimately driving cost increases which inevitably cut into margin and get passed onto the consumer,” warns Kingsland’s Braydon.
“When wine reaches the consumer, the question is: will they accept the changes the industry has had to make?
This article was initially published in the March issue of Global Drinks Intel magazine. For details on how to subscribe click here.
