Can Climate Change Actually Give Us Better Wine?

The study, led by Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Elizabeth Wolkovich and published in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that vineyards across France are harvesting, on average, two weeks earlier than the historical average. Though the study didn’t include this, France isn’t alone in the early-harvest trend; Napa Valley, in California, has also been scoring early harvests lately.

Grapes, like some other fruits, actually respond well to stress. When times are tough for the grapevine, the plant tends to produce fewer and smaller grapes, but with much more sugar – hoping that seed distributors like birds and other animals will devour the extra-delicious fruits and spread seeds despite the hardship. This is pretty well-understood; vintners know that a dry and hot year tends to produce less, but better, wine. In that kind of year, the harvest is also earlier. (And some winemakers in the West prefer dry-farming wine regardless.)

Grapes maturing earlier, and thus forcing an earlier harvest, is a good sign for wine quality. For one thing, it minimizes all the horrible things that can go wrong with a grape harvest: weird bouts of weather, freezing, burning, mold, diseases, pests, or whatever else. If the process is shortened, there’s less time for all that stuff to ruin a harvest. So grape growers love early droughts and hot weather: It means not only better wine, but a more guaranteed decent harvest, even though it’ll likely be smaller. You can see in this Wine Cellar Insider post just how many great vintages there have been in the past ten years.

This study is the first to survey all of France to figure out whether harvests are, on average, unusually early in recent years, and it’s also full of evidence that links those early harvests to climate change.

But it also cautions to read nothing but good things into this pattern. For one thing, grapes are incredibly dependent on micro-climates, and can vary wildly based on small changes in soil or shade or geography. Look at 2003, for example: The year boasted crazy droughts and heat, but resulted in a distinctly mixed bag of wines. Some grapes did not respond as well as others to the heat, and some vines – and remember, these vines are sometimes hundreds of years old – suffered damage. And the heat was pretty rough on other sectors of French agriculture, with cows producing less milk and ducks growing less fatty.

As always, there’s nothing simple about climate change – except that it’s happening.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.