The crippling heat and wildfires that swept through the vineyards of France in the past few weeks portend another bitter cost of climate change: Your fine wine is on the line.
Climate costs to wine producers have been mounting for years in France and well beyond, from northern California to southern Australia. Drought and heat in 2019 cut France’s total wine production by 12 percent, and this year’s lethal combination of heat waves, frosts, hailstorms and wildfires could slash production even more.
The long-term outlook for the global wine industry is grim: Temperatures across all wine-producing regions of Australia, which exports nearly US$3 billion annually, are expected to increase a devastating 3°C by 2100. Scientist have predicted that by 2050, much of Europe, including central Italy and southern France, might become unsuitable for grape production, and California’s wine yields could plunge 70 percent.
Unless, that is, producers find ways to adapt. At least one major California-based winery has begun to implement aggressive strategies, from which Europe’s beleaguered producers — along with investors and aficionados — should draw hope and guidance.
Jackson Family Wines grows about 4,000 hectares of grapes, mostly in California and Oregon, for brands that include Kendall Jackson and La Crema. For the past three years, fires, drought, warm winters and late frosts have compromised production across vast swaths of the company’s vineyards and damaged tens of millions of US dollars of buildings and processing facilities.
For more than a decade the firm has been working on climate resilience strategies that it knows will be essential to its survival.
“The idea that it’s more expensive to tackle climate change than to ignore the problem and let it accumulate — that just does not compute,” said Katie Jackson, who heads the company’s sustainability effort.
Climate stresses on wine growers are both obvious and subtle: Wine grapes, like coffee beans and other so-called “goldilocks crops,” require very specific conditions in which to thrive. Heat can cause grapes to burn and ripen too early, inhibiting the development of flavors and aromas. Higher temperatures lower the acidity of the wine and increase the alcohol content. Grape vines lose their leaves in drought, stunting the fruit. And if wildfires do not scorch the vines themselves, a harvest can still be destroyed by “smoke taint,” which imbeds smoke particles in fruit, rendering it unusable. Warmer temperatures also draw more pests, including mice, voles, gophers and starlings.
Jackson’s team is revving up time-honored solutions and using new tech-driven methods to cope. It plans to practice traditional and regenerative farming on all 4,000 hectares by 2030: populating vineyards with owls and falcons to help control pests, planting cover crops such as rye and barley between vine rows, and supercharging the soil with compost made from waste including grape skins, which helps the soil retain moisture and sequester carbon dioxide.
It has also integrated information technology, drawing data from satellites and drones to monitor drought and pest impacts with the aim of improving irrigation and pre-empting disease outbreaks. It is piloting sensor technologies that measure soil moisture at different depths, and probes that monitor the flow of sap within their vines — further efforts to drought-proof their operations as water scarcity intensifies.
The company has spent decades developing water reservoirs on its vineyards and recently created a groundwater recharge program to reduce its dependence on rivers and local aquifers for irrigation. It now sanitizes its fermentation tanks with ultraviolet light instead of water, saving millions of liters annually.
To protect against frost damage, it has installed solar-powered weather stations with sensors that determine if temperatures drop too low, along with wind machines that automatically circulate warm air to safeguard the fruit.
The Jackson winemaking team is collaborating with scientists to develop new methods to remove smoke taint from crops exposed to wildfire as the grapes are processed. The viticulture team is exploring new grape varietals that are more tolerant to heat and drought, and redeveloping its vineyards with new root stocks that reach deeper into the soil, drawing up more ground water and requiring less irrigation.
Certainly not all wineries will be able to do all this in the coming years — the vineyards I recently visited in France’s Bordeaux region, for instance, were a fraction of the size of Jackson Family Wines, with far smaller research and development budgets.
However, all wineries will have to adapt — and agricultural ministers in every wine-producing country will need to help fund both traditional and technological solutions to support the transition. Investors and consumers need to be prepared to pay more as wineries adjust to harsher conditions, and as many of them expand into cooler and more temperate growing regions.
Jackson Family Wines, for its part, has been increasingly moving its land holdings northward, acquiring lands in Oregon and Washington, while also operating farms internationally in Australia, Europe and South Africa.
Owning land in different geographic regions has become essential to risk management, so when production at one vineyard is disrupted others continue to operate. Smaller local and regional vineyards inherently will be more vulnerable, and will require steadier government and investor support.
Alongside adaptation, Katie Jackson maintains a primary focus on decarbonizing her family’s operations, with a goal of being carbon-neutral by 2030 without purchasing offsets. The company derives about one-third of its energy from on-site solar and it has light-weighted its bottles with more efficient use of glass, the production of which accounts for one-fifth of its climate emissions.
Regenerative farming, with cover cropping and silvopasture (integrating trees and livestock) and storing more carbon in the soil, will do a lot of the work in getting to carbon-negative by 2050.
“Adaptation strategies are important but also fundamentally limited,” Jackson said.
No amount of drones or falcons or soil carbon sensors will matter if climate change continues unabated.
“We have no future without mitigation,” she said.
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Amanda Little is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering agriculture and climate. She is a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University and author of The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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