Bad news for those planning to drink their way through climate change: As temperatures rise, the regions suitable for growing wine grapes shrink.
If global temps grow another 2 °C—the level to which more than 190 nations consented in the Paris Climate Agreement—the world’s wineries could diminish by 56 percent, according to a new study.
Four degrees of warming, meanwhile, could mean 85 percent of those lands are no longer able to produce good wine.
Scientists have long suspected crop diversity is key to making agriculture more resilient to climate change, and wine grapes offer a unique opportunity to test this theory.
Extremely diverse—more than 1,100 varieties are planted under a range of conditions—and well-documented, wine grapes are also extremely sensitive to changes in temperature and season.
“In some ways, wine is like the canary in the coal mine for climate change impacts on agriculture, because these grapes are so climate-sensitive,” according to study co-author Benjamin Cook, from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Cook & Co.—including Ignacio Morales-Castilla of the University of Alcalá in Spain and Elizabeth Wolkovich at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver—focused on 11 varieties of wine grape: cabernet sauvignon, chasselas, chardonnay, grenache, merlot, monastrell (also known as mourvedre), pinot noir, riesling, sauvignon blanc, syrah, and ugni blanc.
The team built models for when each type would bud, flower, and ripen in wine-growing regions under three different warming scenarios: 0, 2, and 4 °C. They then used climate change projections to see where those varieties may be viable in the future.
Example of gains and losses in wine-growing suitability within major wine-producing countries and for two popular varieties (via Ignacio Morales-Castilla)
Fruit casualties are, of course, inevitable. But, researchers found that by “switching these varieties around,” there is the potential to reduce losses “by a significant amount,” Cook said.
So all hope is not lost.
With 2 °C of global warming and zero attempts at modification, 56 percent of international wine-growing areas are likely to go belly up. Learn to adapt, however, and only 24 percent may go extinct.
Cooler areas like Germany, New Zealand, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest would be relatively unscathed at low temperatures. But hot spots such as Italy, Spain, and Australia are staring down the barrel of a deadly grape gun.
“Conversations in Europe have already begun about new legislation to make it easier for major regions to change the varieties they grow,” Wolkovich said. “But growers still must learn to grow these new varieties.
“That’s a big hurdle in some regions that have grown the same varieties for hundreds and hundreds of years,” she continued. “And they need consumers who are willing to accept different varieties from their favorite regions.”
Variety-swapping becomes less effective as global warming increases: Planting climate-specific varieties at 4 °C, for instance, reduces losses by only about one third—from 85 percent to 58 percent.
“The key is that there are still opportunities to adapt viticulture to a warmer world,” Cook said. “It just requires taking the problem of climate change seriously.”
The full study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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