For more than a decade, industry practitioners have been confronting— and academic researchers have been studying —the implications of global climate change for the wine industry. An panel brought together leaders from industry and knowledgeable researchers from academia to engage in a discussion about the effects of global climate change on wine production, and what can be done about it. The panelists brought their diverse backgrounds and great expertise to the discussion. Among the topics examined in this article, which summarizes the highlights of the panel discussion, are: the prevalence of water shortages and ways of adapting; the differential impacts of climate change—in terms of temperature and precipitation changes—on wine growing in different regions of the world; and attention now given by wineries to reducing their own emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).
Keywords: global climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, extreme weather events
In nearly all economies of the world, agriculture is among the most—if not the most—climate sensitive sectors of the economy. And premium wine grape production is among the most climate sensitive of agricultural crops. So academic research ranging from plant physiology to economics is potentially very important. And it goes without saying that in addition to that research, which may be from the academic world, actual adaptation to climate change is necessarily going to be implemented by producers in the private sector.
For Groupe Bollinger, Jean-Baptiste Rivail observes vineyards in Loire, Champagne, Burgundy, Cognac, and Oregon, constituting a very diverse set of climates and terroir. A key question is how his approach to climate change varies across these regions. His response was that there is not a “one-size-fits all approach” for vineyard management and climate change.
Rivail explains that what stands out is that viticulture sits at the intersection of science and tradition. Sometimes science seems to provide an answer but regional tradition is inconsistent with that answer. Therefore, there is not a consistent approach to responding to climate change among vineyards globally. However, there are some commonalities in the portfolio of Groupe Bollinger holdings. A particular challenge is to produce quality wines that reach balanced phenolic ripeness. Because it is warmer, the sugar maturity of wines increases faster, and so the phenolic (aroma) properties of the wines are not sufficient.
Also, across the board, the risk of frost during the growing season has increased, because the vines are developing faster due to higher average temperatures. Since the vines develop earlier, there are greater chances that winter frosts damage the vines. The frosts are not only more often, but also more damaging: in 2016 and in 2021, 50% of Burgundy was damaged by frost. Globally, there are some common responses to this challenge, such as harvesting earlier in the season, using night picks to maintain fruit quality, and increased use of new cultivars that are more suited for the new climate.
There are also some striking differences within the same region. For example, Champagne Premier and Grand Cru are less affected by climate change, because they tend to be located on chalky soil. Chalky soil is white, so it does not warm up as much. And there are differences by varietal: chardonnay is affected less than pinot noir, which is a more fragile plant. Sometimes climate change is not necessarily bad. The Willamette Valley, for example, in Oregon, can now reach full phenolic ripeness, which was not always the case in previous years. And some terroirs in Burgundy that were previously considered to be inferior are now greatly improved because they are warmer.
In addition, there are some new climate-caused external factors that need to be taken into account, such as wildfires, the risk of which has rapidly increased. Some great wine estates, such as Newton Vineyard in the Napa Valley hillsides, were destroyed by wildfire. They had a perfect exposure to combat the implications of climate change: they were eastern facing, higher altitude, but in addition, they were in the middle of a forest.
Finally, a key factor is new-world versus old-world wines. In Europe, there are very strict regulations of the appellations. Whereas in the New World, there are tools to help adapt to climate change. For example, permission to use irrigation, or the ability to bring fruits from outside of the designated American Viticultural Area (AVA). Napa Valley wines, for example, can be just 85% Napa, and just 75% of the designated varietal. As a result, fruits with more freshness can be included, and vineyard stress can be limited with irrigation. That would be impossible in France.
In addition to those differences between the New World and the Old World is the reality that in the Old World, premium wines are named by location, as opposed to varietal, as they are named in the New World. So, in the Willamette Valley, for example, in the face of higher temperatures, one can move production up the hillside. But in Romanée-Conti, if one tries to move production even across the road, it is not Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) any longer.
Those observations about climate challenges led Mark Sahn to explain what action Gallo, a very large wine producer, is taking in the face of current climate change, as well as anticipated future climate change. He explains that Gallo's approach is driven by two guiding principles: (1) what can be controlled? and (2) what will have the biggest impact? With something as broad and challenging as climate change, it is easy to focus on things you cannot control or things that do not have much impact. One key to managing the potential risk of climate change is diversification. Gallo sources grapes and production from several different locations, both within California and beyond. They diversify where they locate their facilities and even what categories they invest in. Diversification is something that can be controlled for the long term.
In the short term, they take action within several different domains: the vineyard, the wineries, packaging, and route to market. Within the vineyard, they focus heavily on water usage, how to manage rising temperatures, more extreme weather events, and the impacts of smoke taint. In the winery, they take an economic approach to reducing water usage. When long-term or capital projects are evaluated, they recognize that the real social cost of water is not zero, so they employ an ‘internal cost’ of water to create incentives to drive more capital projects to reduce water usage.
On packaging, they own their own glass plant, which reduces the movement of glass and has led to the development of a best-in-class lightweight bottle. They have significantly increased the recycled content into their glass with an investment in their own glass cullet recycling center. Lastly, en route to market, a big use of carbon in the industry is moving liquid and glass, which are both heavy. So Gallo has focused on shifting to more rail and less truck freight through their distribution network, and globally, they focus on shipping more through bulk tankers and bottling closer to the location where that product will be sold.
There can be significant benefits for wineries that partner with research institutions when developing means of responding to climate change. An important example is the Catena Institute of Wine, which was founded by Laura Catena in 1995. She explains that the goal of the Catena Institute is to elevate Argentine wine by developing and sharing knowledge and information. The Catena Institute has partnered with universities around the world.
The broad vision of the Catena Institute is to use science to preserve nature and culture. A challenge is that young people are leaving for the cities, and so there may be no one to work in the vineyards of the future. This is an issue most wine regions in the world are facing. So, the institute is studying why people leave and why people stay. Also, the institute looked at the terroir of Malbec in California and Argentina. It was a collaborative project, and it was actually the first multi-continent study of terroir for one varietal that had ever been carried out.
Another example is a project that the University of Burgundy has organized on pinot noir and chardonnay. The Catena Institute is their site for South America. Cooler climates at higher altitudes are a potentially important adaptation strategy for climate change. By collaborating with researchers in other countries, they have better access to technology and can find solutions to climate change together.
Elisabeth Forrestel, an ecophysiologist at the University of California, Davis, explained the importance of thinking not just about the expected average temperature and precipitation in the future, but thinking about the extremes of climate change. She responds that by approaching these issues as an ecologist, she recognizes that collaborative work in this space to resolve these issues is absolutely critical. The vast majority of her work has been trying to understand cultivar suitability, and she notes that looking at just mean change and using only this information to match cultivars to different regions is problematic because of extreme events and how much climatic diversity there can be even within one region.
Over just the past 5 years, even along the West Coast, there are examples of extreme events having massive economic impacts, such as in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, where two vintages were lost to cold snaps. The amount of yield loss due to frosts is much larger even within Napa. More intense fires and longer fire seasons are another huge climate change extreme event that has affected industry. So, focusing on when grapes ripen can avoid some of those really intense fire seasons. The increase in intensity, frequency, and duration of heat extremes has been another important change in recent decades. When thinking about phenolic ripeness that gives rise to high-quality wines, it is now crucial to consider heat extremes more than merely accumulation of heat throughout the season or growing degree days.
When thinking about water availability, it is necessary to rethink whether a cultivar belongs in a given region, how well it is suited for different extremes, and how that can be managed. For example, cabernet sauvignon is planted in much of the world, but how robust is it? It is an extremely robust cultivar, but when there are situations like in 2022 in California, in September just before harvest for many vineyards, temperatures moved up to 45°C (115°F) in one region and the phenolics were severely affected in many areas where the grapes were kept on the vines.
Moving from the natural science side of wine production, there is also, of course, economic analysis of wine production and consumption. Much focus from academics has been on the premium wines of the world, while most wine production is not of premium wines but of lower priced wines.
Daniel Sumner has studied that very important market. He emphasizes that economists work closely with scientists—hydrologists, climatologists, plant physiologists, and others—in analysis of climate change mitigation and adaptation. In California, when considering premium wines and lower priced wines that most people drink, issues are often framed as Central Valley grape production versus coastal grape production. It is not quite as simple as that, but in many parts of the world if you know the geography, you know much about potential wine production and the prices of grapes and wine.
Cheaper wines also probably have less complex climate change impacts. Of course, the effects of climate change on corn, soybeans, or processing tomatoes are complicated, as are the effects of climate change on Central Valley California wines. But there are a few climate issues that are simpler for the cheaper wines. For example, the effects of wildfire and smoke taint apply much less to the broad, flat crop-intensive areas of the Central Valley than to the small vineyards and wineries tucked in and around pastures and wooded hillsides in the coastal regions of California and other regions producing high-priced wines. If one wishes to study the economics of wildfire and smoke taint, it means focusing on Napa and Sonoma, not Fresno or Modesto.
Both premium and low-priced wines are shipped all over the world. The lower priced wines are often shipped in container-sized bladders to avoid shipping the packages, and adapt the labeling and packaging of destination markets. As Gallo and other bulk wine shippers know, bulk wines from the Central Valley of California, Spain, Argentina, or Australia compete in a global market. Bulk wines could arrive on the East Coast of the United States in large containers for consumer packaging. And for climate mitigation, to reduce the carbon footprint, wineries could avoid shipping bottles. A California-based winery with East Coast markets would avoid hauling wine from Argentina or Europe to California for packaging before shipping back to New York or Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The economic principle of comparative advantage is absolutely key. Competition among wines from all over the world means that growers and wineries will adapt competitively to climate change that occurs elsewhere. Fresno may gain relative advantages in wine grape and wine production if the climate for wine grapes in Fresno deteriorates less than the climate for competing crops (almonds or alfalfa, for example), and deteriorates less than the climate does in competing wine regions such as parts of Argentina, Spain, and Australia. For bulk wines, such wine grape comparative advantages may involve grape yields per acre, pest pressures, and irrigation water availability and cost. In California, as a matter of public policy, irrigation water, not suitable farmland, has become the limiting resource. Fresno may grow more grapes even though wine-growing conditions are worse in Fresno than they used to be, because Fresno may develop improved comparative advantage in wine grapes compared with other places.
For Napa, Bordeaux, and parts of Argentina and Australia, for example, varietal quality is crucial to comparative advantage. The challenge is to adapt to climate change in ways that do not disorient buyers who have come to associate particular varieties and practices with certain regions. For example, if Napa were to become less suited to cabernet sauvignon grapes, or irrigation becomes more useful in Bordeaux, would global consumers still pay high premiums for wines with those regional appellations on the labels?
So climate change must be considered in the context of comparative advantage and trade. Wine grapes compete for the land and water locally against the other crops, and wine competes globally for markets. Local wine industries will respond to government and consumer demands for climate mitigation, and will adapt to climate-driven changes in comparative advantage. The global economics for wine grapes and wine has become more complex, and demands more and better data-driven research.
It goes without saying that concerns are increasing about current and anticipated future climate change due to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In nearly all economies of the world, agriculture is among the most climate sensitive sectors of the economy, and premium wine grape production is among the most climate sensitive of all agricultural crops. At the same time as practitioners in private industry have been confronting the implications of climate change for wine production, academic researchers have been studying those implications.
By bringing diverse perspectives from an equally diverse set of panelists from industry and academia, some interesting and even striking issues and findings emerge, including—but not limited to—the prevalence and importance of water shortages and ways of adapting to such shortages; and the differential impacts of climate change—in terms of temperature and precipitation changes—on wine growing in different regions of the world, in particular in the Old World (principally France, Italy, and Spain) versus the New World (mainly the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa). In general, there is a remarkable amount of attention now given by wineries (and academics) to adapting to climate change and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Robert N. Stavins, Laura Catena, Elisabeth Forrestel, Jean-Baptiste Rivail, Mark Sahn, and Daniel A. Sumner have no financial or nonfinancial disclosures to share for this article.
©2025 Robert N. Stavins, Laura Catena, Elisabeth Forrestel, Jean-Baptiste Rivail, Mark Sahn, and Daniel A. Sumner. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) International license, except where otherwise indicated with respect to particular material included in the article.