How Wine Can Beat Climate Change
One of the biggest problems of how the current wine industry is structured is its lack of adaptability.
The wine industry is slow to adapt to technological shifts. It is slow to adapt to changes in taste from generation to generation. This lack of adaptability has hurt the wine industry in recent years as it has failed to anticipate and respond to new millennial consumers’ desires.
But the biggest adaptability failure of wine is one that has not yet been seen as a failure: the unwillingness to adapt the grapes we grow in order to keep up with the continually changing pressures of disease, fungal infections, and climate changes.
We have been cloning the same variety of grapes for the last couple hundred years as if they are sacrosanct. Meanwhile, in the time since those handful of sacred vinifera varieties were selected, fungi, viruses, and insects have changed and adapted hundreds and thousands of times over, and the world has begun to undergo major climatic shifts.
Some of these problems of the wine industry’s adaptability are endemic to the pace of the vines themselves. Vines must be planted and grown for at least 3 years before their grapes can be harvested and used for wine, which may not be ready to drink for another 2 years after that.
Because of the long lead time of vineyard planting and winemaking, the wine industry always seems to be in a position of reacting, rather than responding. Fads in tastes can change by the time it takes a new wine to be made.
But many of these problems of adaptability are the wine industry’s own making. We’ve bought into our own marketing so deeply that we’ve failed to consider a world where Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, or any other known vinifera variety, are not what the consumer asks for.
We’ve built a wine world that is dominated by the promotion and consumption of a handful of outdated grape varieties. But what happens when those varieties are no longer viable?
You may think I’m crazy to suggest that, but it has happened before to other crops. When industries become too reliant on a single variety of anything, all it takes is the right combination of disease or climatic factors to wipe out an entire local or even global supply. Look at the Irish potato famine, or look at the banana industry.
The good news is that there’s a simple solution. It’s not an easy solution, though, and it will take many years. But once effected, the wine industry should be future proof.
The solution is this: instead of grape varieties, the wine industry, specifically the New World wine industry, needs to start (or go back to) promoting the idea of regional wine identities, or wine types based on style rather than grape variety.
The truth is that this is how and why Bordeaux is Bordeaux. Not until the grapes from Bordeaux were exported to the New World did anyone care about Cabernet Sauvignon. We exported the grape, but we failed to export the best part of Bordeaux – it’s adaptability.
Even now, Bordeaux is experimenting with new grape varieties that will be better suited to the future climate of the region, and they are adapting, or considering adapting, their regulations to permit higher and higher percentages of those new grapes.
It won't be long before we will be drinking Bordeaux that contains no Cabernet Sauvignon, Franc, Merlot, Malbec, or Petite Verdot, and does contain grapes that we've never heard of before 2020.
Those of us on the inside of the wine industry forget that only we know or care that Chianti is made with Sangiovese, or Barolo with Nebbiolo, even Burgundy with Pinot Noir or Chardonnay.
Instead of importing the best aspects of these regions – the idea of regionally distinctive wines - we imported the Euro-evocative but change-prohibitive names of the grape varieties.
To be able to adapt, the New World wine industry needs to get consumers asking for “Napa Red” rather than “Napa Cab.”
In addition to regional over varietal identities, producers need to lean into stylistic designations.
If you build your brand on Pinot Noir you have a lot less flexibility to adapt to problems than if you build it on Light, Elegant Red.
Look at the recent successes of red blends and rosés in the marketplace. Consumers of these wines are often drinking varieties of grapes they’ve never heard of, and they love them.
Consumers only care about Sauvignon Blanc because we’ve trained them to. Consumers want a crisp, aromatic white preeminently. We’ve made the mistake of telling them it has to be Sauvignon Blanc, and now that’s what we have to give them.
But the future of wine must embrace the ability to adapt – to climate change and the new insect, fungal, and disease threats it brings.
To do that we need to reframe our marketing and abandon the strict adherence to vinifera varieties (which is mostly a form of Euro-chauvinism anyway) and start letting our grapes and our wine names adapt to local and stylistic expressions.