Grapes under fire: how growers are battling climate change chaos to save wines

Friday, 31 January, 2025
The Drinks Business, Kathleen Willcox
Grape growers face mounting challenges from climate change, adapting with innovative practices to protect their vines and craft premium wines amid extreme conditions.

Grapes are, by nature, finicky. They can only grow in certain temperatures and conditions—typically, the growing season should average 55-70 degrees Fahrenheit (13-21 degrees Celsius) for optimum results.

Climate change has turned trying to farm grapes into the equivalent of performing operations in the eye of a hurricane. Every decision and moment still counts, and the already inherently tense and fraught conditions suddenly feel perilous, even existential.

How can growers manage to farm in conditions that are constantly in flux?

Drastic climate changes

Wildfires are arguably the most potent and easily understandable symbol of climate change. Wildfires have doubled around the globe in the past two decades, and that increase in both frequency and magnitude is linked directly to climate change, according to a new analysis published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

But there’s a lot more change happening on the ground and in the air.

Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998 in the U.S., and 2014-2023 was the warmest decade globally on record. Extreme heat waves are three times more prevalent and longer than they were in the 1960s. Precipitation has increased across the world overall, although some regions are getting less precipitation than they were previously.

Precipitation also isn’t as steady and predictable as it once was; records for one-day precipitation events in the U.S. are on the rise. (Nine out of the top 10 years for extreme events have occurred since 1995).

In wine country in the past decade, everyone has seen firsthand the shocking variety of extremes that climate change can bring, from record-breaking heat waves and wildfires to years-long droughts followed by severe floods, random bouts of devastating hail, and early and late frosts.

Change doesn’t come cheap: fallout from extreme weather events has cost the world around US$2.8 trillion in the past 20 years, according to the World Economic Forum. How is wine country doing its part to weather the US$16.3 million per hour cost of extreme weather, while also planting the seeds for premium wine success?

On the ground changes: soil health + trellising tweaks

Grape growers are war-weary, but battle-ready, making tactical and strategic adjustments on the ground as they witness shifting seasonal norms and forecast future ones.

Study after study has shown that soil health is essential for healthier, more climate-resistant crops, carbon sequestration and better yields. Conventional agricultural practices, like intensive soil tillage and the use of chemical fertilizers, degrades soils and damages the soil microbiome.

“From heat domes, droughts and water curtailments to overly generous rainfall, it seems like we’ve seen it all in recent years,” Ned Nuemiller, viticulture director of Seghesio Family Vineyards, which has six different ranches from Northern Alexander Valley to the Russian River Valley.

As the unexpected becomes expected, Nuemiller says they are focused on increasing organic matter on the ground, with 20-30 different species of plants of cover crops.

“I really like the resiliency they bring to the vineyard,” he says, adding that using a “mulch blanket a few times a year really helps manage soil moisture evaporation and decreases vineyard canopy temperatures.”

Nuemiller says that Seghesio is pivoting away from quick-fix conventional farming’s prescriptive agricultural model to a long-term regenerative strategy. The transformation has enabled the vineyards to withstand the opposite extremes without the impacts that they were seeing before, and has had other outsize benefits, like reducing the need for irrigation.

“Soil health has increased as we’ve walked away from herbicide applications and become Ok with having living plant material on the vineyard floor year-round now,” he says. “It helps stabilize temperatures, but also slows down rainfall so we can maintain and capture more gallons per acre on an annual basis, reducing our need for gallons that we need to pump.”

Regenerative agriculture

At Honig Vineyard and Winery in Rutherford, the team is working on improving soil health with the help of sheep.

“The entire vineyard is cover cropped and we collaborate with neighbours to bring in a contract sheep grazing outfit to mow the cover crop in the spring prior to bud-break to improve soil health,” says Kristin Belair, director of winegrowing and sustainability at Honig.

The sheep’s gentle massaging of the soil with their hooves and the contributions they make with their au naturel fertilizer increases soil health. And that plus Honig’s permanent cover crop also helps boost soil moisture, create cooler soil temperatures, preserve air quality, prevent topsoil loss and enhance the biodiversity in the vineyard.

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