2) Extreme weather has become more common and unpredictable. Although warmer weather overall has resulted in milder winters, they’re not consistently stay mild. As we mentioned, vines have been coming out of dormancy early, but then a monthlong cold snap will come along to kill off swathes of vineyards, especially young and fragile vines before growing season even begins. In 2021, one of these frost snaps in April in France affected 90 percent of the country’s vineyards, resulting in the lowest wine production in France since the Second World War. Otherwise, the world is seeing more wildfires, floods, droughts, and severe hailstorms, all of which used to happen once a decade that are now happening on an annual basis, again, decimating vines.

As we have discussed in previous wine club offerings, Vitus vinifera thrives in two wine belts (read our wine club edition on High Altitude Wines to learn more about the wine belts) that wrap around the world laterally, one north of the equator and one south of the equator. The different varietals of Vitus vinifera are mutations that have adapted to the range of climates within these wine belts. Varietals more tolerant of warmer temperatures grow well in the south of the Northern Hemisphere belt and in the north of the Southern Hemisphere belt and vice versa for varietals that have adapted to colder temperatures.

The biggest news on the varietal shift is in France, of course, where appellations are the strictest in terms of which types of varietals are allowed to be included in an appellation, which is always based on region. After one too many challenging harvests, the infamous Bordeaux appellations are allowing seven new varietals into their blends, most of them not even native to the nation of France: Marselan, Touriga Nacional, Castets and Arinarnoa (cross of Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat) for red; and and Alvarinho, Petit Manseng and Liliorila for white. Of course, this is news because France is so rigid in what varietals it allows in its appellation wines, but transplanted varietals are happening all over the world, which we will see for some of the wines we select for these wine clubs.

Source: https://winefolly.com/tips/start-planning-now-wine-harvest-season/

Louis Schofield and Hannay Jeffrey, owners of Worlds Apart

For example, after the devastating 2020 bushfires, Louis and Hannah worked with their farmer partners to better protect the vineyards with trenches and clearing brush, but being careful not to disturb vital natural soils, native grasses, and other biodiversity on the farms. Because Vitus vinifera is not native to Australia, the challenge has been to find varietals that thrive in the unique changing climate of Australia. They found, or example, that Grenache is the grape to make Burgundian style wines in South Australia because the vines require less water. Syrah (aka Shiraz) is also a natural because of its ability to thrive in hotter climates, and then they have also increasingly been working with Nero d’Avola for its drought-resistant properties as drought has become another of South Australia’s global warming realities.

For this single-varietal Syrah wine, they used native yeast to ferment 60 percent of the grapes in whole cluster in open-top tanks for 10 days before even racking after then they were pressed into neutral French oak 225-500 liter barrels where the wine aged for four months and bottled without fining or filtering

FOOD PAIRINGS: Mediterranean-style chicken and lamb dishes, roast cuts in aromatic herbs, classic shawarmas, chargrilled kebabs, ratatouille, cassoulet, chickpea-focused dishes, eggplant, mushrooms and butterbeans dishes, barbecue.

Before phylloxera, Sumoll was one of the most widely planted varietals throughout Catalonia, so it was not difficult for the Ramon and Jordi to find cuttings of old vines in the region to plant, and from here they incorporated the forest surrounding the vineyards into their oversight as well as the land bordering them to create an agrarian ecosystem, and they chose to live on the property to be as attuned as possible to the ecology. They started their viticulture enterprise by dry farming the vines (no irrigation) and not ploughing the soils to avoid erosion. However, global warming has created a twist – although the climate is usually humid enough to dry farm and leave the soil alone, in recent years it has barely rained.

Ramon Parera and Jordi Arnan are hands-on in all aspects of the process.

So, although they believe firmly in spontaneous and native vegetal covers, which they have maintained and cared for during the last 30 years, the drought has forced the viticulturists to till the soils to avoid competition for water from the natural grasses. They have also been pruning the vines more, even though it reduces production, and pruning the leaves more, but with caution, keeping in mind the higher temperatures and the need for grape clusters to profit from the shade of the vine leaves. Lastly, they have brought forward the harvest dates by about fifteen days, looking for the optimal ripening point.

Yet the pair maintains (and other growers in the region agree and have followed suit) that their success lies largely with the native varietals as the vines are more symbiotic with the ecology of the area thus more adaptable to changing with adapting along with the many aspects of that is also being affected by global warming without too much dependence on human intervention.

The viticulturists are as natural in the cellar as they are in the fields. After hand harvesting, they let fermentation happen spontaneously with native yeasts and destem 50 percent of the grapes and combine them with 50 percent whole grapes with stems to allow for gravity to do its own fermentation work. Afterward, they age the pressed juice for 3 months in concrete tanks and the wine is neither stabilized nor clarified. Instead, before aging they use a mix of steel, concrete and oak for fermenting and élèvage to achieve different expressions.
Making a single-varietal Sumoll wine was no easy task. There is a reason why farmers in centuries past favored international varietals over the native Sumoll grape as it is not an easy to grape varietal to work with. As Jordi so poetically puts it, Sumoll is “the most masochistic grape there is.” But with lots of attention, they have managed to work its rusticity into a delicate, fresh table red wine.

FOOD PAIRINGS: fish stew with bell peppers, roasted vegetables and haloumi, duck confit, dishes that incorporate truffles, Ibérico pork dishes

However, in recent years the climate in Lake County has shifted so that it resembles the temperature and growing seasons of Napa Valley to the south where single varietals are the norm as vines are less taxed and less chemically volatile. Add to this the cool air that blows off Clear Lake and the climate has become even more consistent than in Napa Valley, which has been experiencing not only hotter weather, but more unpredictable weather patterns and related events, such as fire and flooding to name the most frequent. In Lake County, the temperatures are getting 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the day during the summer but dropping to 50 at night according to its mountain climate.

So, while in Napa farmers are either harvesting earlier or figuring out ways to shade the grapes to avoid over-ripening due to global warming, Lake County now has the climate Napa did in the 1980s. On top of this, Lake County has natural advantages of mountain climates, such as clear air (the cleanest in California), drier air (fog is rare), and high intensity UV light (which results from both dry air and elevation), and the more challenging volcanic soil reduces pests and diseases from taking hold, enabling more environmentally sound farming practices.