
14 Sep 2022 California’s wine country buckles under climate extremes
California’s wine country, including the famed Napa and Sonoma valleys, faces a climate crisis so dire that it’s posing an existential threat to the future of the state’s industry.
Grapes have been hit with one extreme after another. The 2022 season started out with a deep frost that iced over verdant green buds, nipping them right off the vine. For the crops that survived, the freeze quickly gave way to drought and heat. Just in the past week, record-breaking temperatures baked parched vineyards. Then there’s the ever-present threat of wildfires and smoke damage.
The state’s wine-grape production is expected to drop almost 4% in 2022 to 3.5-million tonnes, according to US department of agriculture estimates. It will be the second-smallest crop of the decade, trailing only the fire-ravaged harvest from 2020.
For Craig Ledbetter, who owns and helps manage more than 6,000ha of wine grapes throughout California, extreme frost in the Central Valley’s Lodi and Clarksburg wine areas wiped out about a third of the crop on his family vineyards in the region during 2022’s late freeze.
There was absolutely nothing that could be done about it: Mother Nature just says ‘You’re done’
Craig Ledbetter, owner of Vino Farms
“There was absolutely nothing that could be done about it: Mother Nature just says, ‘You’re done,’” said Ledbetter of Lodi, California-based Vino Farms. He’s now focused on how grapes are faring under the recent blistering heat that can shrivel the fruit. While thin-skinned varieties such as chardonnay, zinfandel and pinot noir are especially vulnerable, all types are at risk.
“I don’t think anything will come through unscathed,” he said.
There’s been much hand-wringing through the years over what climate change will mean for California’s $45bn wine industry. But now experts are starting to say the vineyards are already near the tipping point. It’s not about what will happen in the future — the vicious cycle of more intense, more frequent, crop-killing disasters has already begun.
“A significant freeze used to be something we’d talk about every four years,” said Karissa Kruse, president of the Sonoma County Winegrowers in Santa Rosa, California. “Now, we are dealing with frost, flood and heat events in the span of every two months.”
It’s not just one bad season. In the past several years, the trend has been down for the California harvest. If this year’s department of agriculture forecast of 3.5-million tonnes is realised, that would be a drop of 18% from a peak of 4.29-million in 2018. Output hasn’t reached 4-million since 2019.
Of course, the problems extend beyond California. Climate pressures are weighing on vineyards worldwide. The changing conditions are making some historical wine areas in the Mediterranean and Australia inhospitable, while new players are popping up in other regions, such as the UK.
Will Drayton of Australia-based Treasury Wine Estates, one of the world’s largest wine companies with vineyards in the Napa Valley, France’s Bordeaux and globally, said there’s no question that the industry is amid a broad shift.
Source: Bloomberg