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Enjoy Your Favorite Wine Before Climate Change Destroys It

Extreme heat and droughts are making it harder to grow grapes in many traditional regions. Here’s how scientists are helping the industry adapt.

Due to ever-fiercer droughts and heat waves, 90 percent of the traditional coastal and lowland wine growing regions of Spain, Italy, Greece, and southern California could be at existential risk by the end of the century. Meanwhile, rising temperatures are opening up new regions to growing, like the southern United Kingdom, as wine production generally shifts to higher latitudes and altitudes, where it’s cooler. “You need a degree of heat to get through the ripening phase, to get sugar accumulation, and then also get the ideal amount of development of some of these secondary compounds like anthocyanins and tannins—all the things that make wine exciting and interesting and have good mouthfeel,” says Elisabeth Forrestel, a viticulturist and ecologist at UC Davis who wasn’t involved in the new paper.

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