France and Italy, the world’s most important wine-producing countries, saw this year’s grape crops shrivel thanks to a series of what we now call ‘weather events’, most of which put severe pressure on those trying to farm organically or biodynamically. The number of times vignerons had to spray their vineyards rose to record levels.
The new buzzword in farming is regenerative, putting all the emphasis on soil health rather than on what happens above ground. There’s an official certification body for regenerative viticulture, ROC. It has certified 13 wine estates in California, and one, Mirabeau, in France.
In these times of unpredictable weather, old vines have proved much more resilient, and there have recently been official moves to define what constitutes an ‘old’ vine, based on the definitions in the free online compendium of old vineyards worldwide, The Old Vine Registry. So with any luck, terms such as Vieilles Vignes on labels will come to mean something dependable.
While the world’s third and fourth most important wine producers Spain and California, plagued by drought until recently, have suffered extreme rainfall, grapes in countries regarded as cool climate not so long ago now suffer from sunburn. Wildfires are affecting even classic wine regions such as Bordeaux. Warmer winters encourage earlier budbreak, putting the nascent crop at increasing risk of spring frost. Whole wine regions such as Hawke’s Bay in New Zealand can be transformed by a cyclone.
Total wine production around the world continues to fall, and certainly won’t rally while so many French vignerons take advantage of the official vine-pull scheme. In a macro sense, this is not so bad since total wine consumption also continues to fall, but the effect on individual farmers can be tragic. One British professional wine buyer told me that Bordeaux négociants on each side of the Garonne estuary had told him of grape suppliers threatening suicide if the négociant didn’t take their grapes.
I haven’t heard of such drastic responses from those who sell rather than produce wine but there is widespread gloom in the fine-wine trade, of which London has been such a centre. Many consumers who would routinely stock up on each new vintage of bordeaux and burgundy have been put off by the relentlessly high prices. News of the crisis in Bordeaux’s overproduction has been focused on the bottom end, especially wine estates in the Entre-Deux-Mers that were blithely expanded when times were good, and indeed the landscape there is being transformed. But demand has been softening considerably even for quite smart bordeaux.
Click HERE to read the full article.