Wine regions will feel the heat

What’s the first industry to fall victim to climate change? There’s a decent argument that it already happened — more than 600 years ago.

When the Norman Conquest in 1066 installed a French feudal aristocracy in the British Isles, the invaders brought with them a love of winemaking. Those skills flourished in the conditions of the Medieval Warm Period, a patch of unusually high temperatures from about 950 to 1250 that allowed vineyards to spread across the well-drained chalk soils of southern England. The mild conditions gave way to a frigid period known as the Little Ice Age, however, which held sway until the 19th century. As the climate cooled, English viticulture collapsed.

That should be a worrying example if you’re a winemaker. Grape vines are notoriously sensitive to the smallest changes in landscape and climate. Those with a skilled palate can supposedly sense the subtlest of environmental effects in a bottle of wine — whether the winter that preceded the vintage was warm or cold, the harvest wet or dry, the grapes grown on a slope facing to the north or the south.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how a warming climate could play havoc with this. Own a semiconductor factory, and your climate exposures will occur on the macro scale. Will bigger rainstorms flood the site and will hotter summers push up my bill for air conditioning? A vintner, on the other hand, has to think about micro issues. Will a few extra warm nights or blazing days in growing season throw off the delicate balance of sugar and water formation in developing bunches? And will that make the resulting bottles less fragrant or complex than they otherwise would be?

For winemakers in Europe, a fresh climate headache is looming in the geographic indications they’ve used to defend their art. For the best part of a century, European agricultural producers have built a complex system of intellectual property around the idea that particular types of food and drink are regionally distinctive, and have names that must be protected under copyright law. There’s even a line on geographical indications in the Treaty of Versailles, the document that formally ended World War I.

Recognition of geographic indications is a basic hurdle for any nation wanting to strike a trade deal with the European Union and gain access to the world’s second-biggest market. It’s why makers of sparkling wine in most of the world can’t call their product Champagne, and why Australian and Canadian producers of fortified white wine these days label their bottles as “Apera,” because only those from the Jerez region of Spain can call themselves Sherry. Fully 1,646 of the 1,658 geographic indications for wine listed on the European Union’s eAmbrosia register are for EU countries. Of the rest, five are in the U.K., four in China, two are in the U.S. and one in Brazil.

Adding such geographic limits might have seemed like a good idea during the stable climate of the 20th century, but in the more disordered era into which we’re now moving it’s a risk. Many geographic indications assign a specific grape variety for a specific region. Barolo, arguably Italy’s most revered wine style, must be grown only with Nebbiolo grapes in a handful of communities among the misty mountains of Piedmont. As a warming planet makes the climate of northern Italy more like regions further south where Nebbiolo can’t flourish, the rigidity of Barolo’s geographic indication risks driving it into extinction.

Researchers in Europe recently analyzed 1,085 wine geographic indications across the continent to work out which were most at risk from a warming climate. What they found should worry viticulturalists: a swath of country is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and has little natural capacity to adapt.”Strong yield decreases were projected for northern Italy, central Spain, Greece, and Bulgaria,” they wrote, “and decreased suitability for Spain, parts of France, central and northern Italy, and large parts of eastern Europe.” In Burgundy, regions known for the Pinot Noir grape may become unable to grow the variety. The geographic indication system needs to be rethought to allow winegrowers to switch their practices as the climate warms, they argued.

That shouldn’t be impossible. Champagne, grown at the northern limit of wine cultivation and traditionally seen as the product of a difficult environment, is conventionally made from just three grape varieties: Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Meunier. But there are four other less celebrated varieties that can be added to the blend, and may provide a way of preserving the wine’s characteristics even as the climate of Champagne starts to more closely resemble that of southern France. A further variety, known as Voltis, has been bred as part of a deliberate effort to prepare for the effects of a warmer climate.

For many wine regions, that’s going to be a wrenching shift. What makes European wine unique is the marriage of a particular grape and viticultural practice with a particular region’s soil, climate and intangibles. That sort of thinking is going to have to change as the planet warms. If Europe’s winemakers don’t want to experience the fate of medieval English vineyards, they’ll need to adapt before they’re wiped out.