When Emma Serner met and fell in love with Italian enologist Andrea Guerra in Tuscany, the young couple began to dream about starting their own vineyard together. "We were both very invested in climate topics and environmental questions," said Serner, who was interning at the vineyard Guerra was working at. "But I really felt like it would be impossible to do in the south of Europe. Climate change really has become drastic and it's affecting agriculture in a very severe way."
In recent years, heat waves, drought and smoke from wildfires have wreaked havoc on vineyards around Europe, making it increasingly difficult to produce the same legacy wines that producers have consistently been churning out for centuries. Last year, southern European winemakers faced historically low harvests due to bad weather.
Serner suggested heading up to her home country of Sweden and setting up a vineyard on the island of Gotland, a southern province with warm, mild summers where her grandmother owned a summerhouse.
But Guerra wasn't sure. "He had never heard of Gotland," Serner said, "He asked, 'What is it? Are there polar bears?' You know, all the southern European myths about Sweden came up. And then he started asking very intricate questions about soil composition, climate, air humidity, UV radiation and the average temperature. After quite a while, he said he was still very sceptical, but there is potential."
They took a leap of faith, and today, Serner and Guerra are the co-founders of Långmyre Vineri – a 10-acre vineyard on Gotland, with a collection of 26,000 vines. They are part of a small yet growing cohort of Swedish winemakers whose collective land area spans between 370 to 500 acres. "It was really just a fantasy," admitted Serner. "But things kind of escalated quite quickly."
As the world gets hotter, cool climate viticulture is becoming increasingly attractive. Since the late 1800s, the average global temperature has risen about 1C, which might seem incremental but has significant repercussions for the wine industry. "A 2C global increase in temperature could remove 55% of wine growing regions worldwide and 4C could remove over 70% of these regions from production," said Debbie Inglis, the director of the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute in Canada, citing a 2020 study.
Once seen as experimental and at the fringe of what's possible, a commercial wine industry in regions just below the Arctic circle is taking advantage of the warmer summers. In the last decade, southern Sweden, Denmark, Nova Scotia in Canada and even parts of Norway have become emerging wine destinations, a development spurred by hotter summers and the introduction of disease-resistant hybrid grape varieties that can resist the frigid winters.
"During the last 20 years, we've had the opportunity to harvest grapes on yearly basis," said Lotta Nordmark, a horticulturist and researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, about the Swedish wine industry. "In earlier years when you tried to grow wine in Sweden, it wasn't guaranteed that you could get a good harvest every year."
Sweden has been dabbling in viticulture since 1999, but wine makers didn't start hitting their stride until around 2010 when cold-hardy hybrid grapes like Solaris were introduced via Germany, according to Sveneric Svensson, the chairman of the Swedish Wine Association. "Solaris was born in Frankfurt, but it's really too warm for it there," Svensson said. "In Sweden, because it's colder, it's got a slow and nice development that doesn't ripen that brutally."
From an environmental standpoint, hybrid grapes are disease resistant cultivars that don't require much or any pesticides or fungicides – the main reason why Serner and Guerra decided to set up shop in southern Sweden instead of Italy. "We firmly believe that these hybrid varieties are the future of sustainable wine growing," said Serner. "People are so fixated with making the same wine from the same varieties, even though the recipe that was written 200 years ago was made when the world looked different."
In old wine countries like Italy and France, there are strict appellation rules dictating what type of grapes can be grown and where. But the problem is that with the changing climate, some of these legacy grapes no longer thrive as well as they did before.
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