6 Ways That Climate Change Affects The Wine In Your Glass

"Is climate change really affecting the wine in my glass?"

That was the question that any consumer in the audience yesterday would have had answered, as a panel dedicated to climate change in the wine industry helped to kick off a very strong program of events at Vinexpo, the four-day, biennial trade fair in Bordeaux that has just begun.

The ante has been upped in recent years for organizers to deliver highly relevant, highly actionable content over multiple days, as strong competition emerges from similar and well-performing trade fairs in cities like Düsseldorf, Verona, and Hong Kong. But within just a few hours of opening its doors yesterday, Vinexpo asserted its intentions on behalf of the French wine industry's position in the global marketplace: it formally announced a partnership with Alibaba’s B2C e-marketplaces Tmall and Tmall Global, for example, and it convened a panel of prominent winemakers and advocates to address the issue of climate change.

What does all of this mean for the consumer?

It comes down, of course, to what's in their glass, and whether changes to the environment will affect the taste and cost of their wine.

The answer on both counts is yes, to varying and interesting degrees. Here are six takeaways from the "Fire and Rain" panel presentation and Q&A yesterday, which Vinexpo organized in partnership with Wine Spectator magazine. The takeaways sketch the landscape of what climate change literally means in the vineyards and "behind the scenes," so to speak, which ultimately impacts the wine in a consumer's glass.

1. Grape Yield and Quality. Dr. John P. Holdren, professor of environmental policy and science at Harvard, delineated the factors that impact the yield and quality of wine grapes. Those factors include higher average temperatures, heat waves, droughts, torrential downpours, increased pests and pathogens, and increased carbon dioxide.

   
   

2. Costs and Side Effects of Operations. "Increases in average temperatures will be both a benefit and liability," Holdren said, depending on the location and circumstances of the vineyards, how they are currently managed, and the actions that growers and wineries proactively take to adjust to changing conditions. "But the increases in temperature extremes will hurt everyone."

   
   

3. Recovering Carbon Dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a natural by-product of wine fermentation, which wineries can recover and put to use elsewhere. Miguel A. Torres, president of Bodegas Torres, described his team's experiments with this process, from algae to vegetable fertilizer to cyclic carbonate production.

   
   

4. Delayed Ripening of Grapes. Torres described several strategies that growers can implement in order to delay the ripening of grapes in the vineyard, including clonal selection, plantation density, manual de-leafing (which his teams no longer do), limiting the height of vines, and hail nets.

   
   

5. Shift Away from Seasonal Workers. Gaia Gaja, co-owner of Gaja Winery in Italy's Piedmont region, spoke of the shift at her winery away from relying on seasonal workers, and instead maintaining staff year-round. "Climate change means unpredictable work," she said, "so they are busy from January to December." Their activities including "grassing," which is planting more diverse varieties of grasses and grains between the rows of vines. “The more life we have on a piece of land, the fewer problems we have of one pest predominating over another,” she said.

   
   

6. Preventing Soil Erosion. Those diverse grasses between the rows of vines is one way that climate change is visualized within the vineyards. The height of those grasses is another. Gaja allows the grasses to grow without cutting them, and relies on roller machines to bend the grasses and "blanket" the soil to keep it moister, protect it from the sun, and make it less likely to erode.