Forget about terroir and diversify, winemakers told
Winemakers should ditch the concept of terroir, and focus instead on growing alternative grape varieties to deal with climate change.
This is according to a new study which suggests that winemakers’ reluctance to experiment with different grape varietals could be counter productive in overcoming the challenges of changing climate paterns.
According to the study published in Nature Climate Change, winemakers need to better understand the wide diversity of grapes and their suitability to differing climates. However, a significant hurdle in persuading winemakers of this is the much-revered concept of terroir, says the report’s author, climate change biologist Elizabeth Wolkovich from Harvard University.
“Terroir is the belief that a wine’s character is a reflection of where and how the specific varieties of grapes were grown. Thus, only certain traditional or existing varieties are part of each terroir, leaving little room for change,” she said. “There’s a real issue in the premier wine-growing regions, that historical terroir is what makes great wine, and if you acknowledge in any way that you have climate change, you acknowledge that your terroir is changing,” Wolkovich.
“So, in many of those regions there is not much of an appetite to talk about changing varieties.” Wine producers now face a stark choice, she believes; proactively experiment with new varieties, or risk suffering the negative consequences of climate change.
“With continued climate change, certain varieties in certain regions will start to fail – that’s my expectation,” she said. Research shows that global warming will result in wine grape production increasingly moving into northern Europe and locations along the Canadian-US border However, “we don’t expect to be able to grow winegrapes by the end of the century in large parts of Italy, much of Spain, and some of our favourite regions of France, including Bordeaux, Cotes du Rhone and Burgundy,” said Wolkovitch.
While the grapes most widely produced today are the ones that were the easiest to grow in historical climates, Wolkavich said that winemakers are missing out on a lot of “great grapes better suited for the future”. However, even if an appetite for change existed, she added, researchers don’t yet have enough data to say whether other varieties would be able to adapt to climate change.
The study’s co-author Ignacio Morales-Castilla suggested that winemakers could start setting aside small areas of their vineyards to experiment with other varieties, to see which work best.
In Europe, Wolkovich added, growers have the advantage of tremendous diversity, with more than 1000 varietals to choose from. However, strict labelling laws limits winemakers’ abilities to take advantage of this wealth of choice. For example, only three varieties are allowed to be used in the production of Champagne, and four from Burgundy.
“The more you are locked into what you have to grow, the less room you have to adapt to climate change,” Wolkovich said.
Meanwhile, growers in other parts of the world face the opposite problem – with few, if any, restrictions on what grapes they can use in a given region, the problem arises because growers often have little experience of the diverse and potentially more adaptable varieties of grapes available. For example, only 12 varities of grapes account for more than 80% of all the grapes produced in Australian vineyards, Wolkovich pointed out, with Cabernet Sauvignon comprising over three quarters of grapes grown in China – mainly because they are the wines consumers want to buy.