Along with high temperatures, wine regions around the world reported new records for early grape harvests this summer. For some, it was weeks ahead of the traditional fall schedule, for others it was months in advance. In the heart of the Roussillon in France, Domaine Lafage started picking grapes on July 23, something winemaker Jean-Marc Lafage told France Info he’d never seen before. On California’s Central Coast, winemakers started their harvest around the same time, some six to eight weeks earlier than what used to be considered normal, with grape grower Kevin Merrill calling it out as the earliest date he’d seen in 27 years. Champagne, Burgundy, and a number of German regions all made headlines for their record harvests, with most articles focusing on the challenges of making wine when grapes come in early, and how vintners can cope with fruit-based issues like low yields and varying levels of sugar and acidity.
But early harvests don’t just affect how wine is made, and ever-hotter summers don’t just complicate work in the vineyard and the cellar. From the Languedoc to San Luis Obispo, climate change is hitting various aspects of the wine industry, from wine tourism to packaging and distribution. Not all of those challenges can be easily overcome. And in fact, not all of them are negative, with at least a couple of arguable upsides, both for winemakers and for drinkers.
How People Drink
A Central Coast native who earned a master’s degree in oenology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Aaron Jackson returned to his hometown to make wine and help push for the creation of California’s San Luis Obispo Coast AVA, which launched in 2022. His bottles, sold under the Aaron Wines and Akana labels, focus on the terroirs of west Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo, respectively. In those regions, record high temperatures don’t just affect how people produce wine. They also affect how people drink it.
“I can tell you for sure — with very strong evidence — that people don’t like to go taste wine when it’s really frickin’ hot,” he says. That evidence comes from the Aaron Wines tasting room, located in Paso Robles’ Tin City warehouse and beverage district, where the manager keeps track of daily temperatures, as well as visitors. “July is one of our worst months of the year, and every year, the hotter that it is, visitation goes way down.”
In part, that could be due to the kind of wines that local wineries are making. Paso Robles, he notes, makes “relatively big, full-bodied reds,” which, naturally, don’t sell terribly well when the sun is blazing. Travel temperatures are also an issue. Even if wine lovers do go on a hot-weather vacation to a wine region, he says, they’re unlikely to buy several cases of wine that’s going to “get blown up in their car” on the way home.
Those high temperatures don’t just limit the sales of takeaway cases at tasting rooms. In addition, they are starting to affect — meaning severely limit — a winery’s ability to do direct-to-consumer (DTC) and wine-club sales. If wineries used to be able to ship wine safely for eight or nine months a year without worrying about warm temperatures ruining the wine along the way, climate change is shortening that timeline.
“As a very DTC-driven winery, with our wine club, we’ve been really fighting with temperatures across the country,” he says. “We used to have a kind of blackout period where we would not ship wine. And that blackout period keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
Similar challenges are hitting small producers in Europe, the continent where temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else. After a career in tech, Šárka Betke launched her own natural-wine sales and distribution business in Berlin, Germany, before returning to her native region of Moravia in the southeastern Czech Republic. This year, she and a childhood friend, Jakub Herzán, started releasing the first wines from the Lacery, a small vineyard on a locally famous sandstone hill in the old winemaking town of Kobylí.
With this summer’s temperatures well above long-term averages and the biggest heat waves topping 40º Celsius, or 104º Fahrenheit, wine tourism numbers in Moravia were down, and shipping was similarly limited, she says. In some cases, that affected cash flow: If shipments have to be delayed until later in the fall, the wineries won’t receive their payments until later, either.
“We were not that badly hit, just because we only released our first wines a couple of weeks ago, so we were just getting started with sales,” she says. “But for many more established wineries that see summer as their big sales channel, they were badly affected, to the point that they really do struggle financially right now.”
A Smorgasbord of Small Challenges
Other heat-based challenges can be surprisingly trivial — and often in places that many of us wouldn’t expect. Betke points out that the heat can mess with something as simple as packaging and labeling, as when workers are putting labels on bottles, which might not stay affixed if the temperatures are too warm, requiring do-overs that directly translate to higher costs.
Host of the Inside Winemaking Podcast and winemaker at Seavey Vineyard in Napa Valley, Jim Duane cites an array of overlooked early-harvest and climate-based challenges to the industry, including the steadily rising cost of insurance, as well as new water costs. Last year, Napa Valley approved new fees on water rights, including on the well water that is used for irrigation by most producers in the region, though a recent change will lower those fees for the next fiscal year. “It’s a new cost layer indirectly tied to climate and drought pressure on groundwater management,” he says.
Rising electricity costs are also part of the picture. When harvest happens in October, temperatures are generally pretty cool. Move that up by a month or two and wineries need to use more electricity for refrigeration and processing at a time when electricity prices are hitting their apex.
“Harvest is the highest energy demand period for wineries,” Duane says. “As harvest shifts earlier into August instead of October, that peak demand now lands during the hottest part of the year instead of the cooler fall. Wineries need more cooling to hit the same temperatures, which raises costs and puts more strain on refrigeration systems.”
And of course, the shorter window of an early harvest also means much more pressure on the people and businesses that used to have more comfortable schedules.
“When multiple varieties or regions ripen closer together than they used to, it strains crews, custom crush facilities, and mobile bottling lines,” he says. “There are supply-chain pressures on packaging, too.” That can include something as fundamental to the industry as glass wine bottles, which are made in high-temperature furnaces that, in the past, have occasionally been forced to cease production during major heat waves.
Potential Benefits for Wine
Not all of the changes due to early harvest and climate change are negative, especially when it comes to travel. Family travel generally peaks in summer and ends with the start of the school year. But if harvests now take place in the travel-heavy summer, Duane notes, tourism to many wine regions might actually increase.
Warming temperatures have clearly extended wine tourism in many parts of the Old World, according to Mark Hallett, founder of the custom tour operator Grape Escapes. In years past, very few travelers wanted to go to Champagne in late fall, when things were often cold and wet. Nowadays, with much nicer fall weather, his bookings for that period are way up.
“Typically European wine tourism has a May-June peak and a September-October peak,” he says. “With climate change, the second peak is pushing back into November.”
Another upside to the early harvest is that fall visitors to regions like Champagne, Burgundy, or the Loire might get more face time with vintners. When the harvest is on, most winemakers are very, very busy.
“There’s something magical about that harvest season, and seeing that at least once I would strongly recommend,” Hallett says. After that, he recommends visiting wineries at a less frenetic time. “You get much more chance to actually have a decent dialogue with them about what’s going on.” At quieter times of year, he notes, visitors might even get to sit down with a winemaker and sample different vintages, something that would almost never happen during harvest.
For Jackson, that kind of communication might be one of the benefits of the new era of wine. The main downsides to climate change and early harvests are uncertainty and unpredictability, he says, with winemakers having to compensate and adjust to changing conditions on the fly. But those changing conditions also offer winemakers a chance to tell their story.
“At the end of the day, I think the strength in winemaking and what’s going to lure people back to wine is this idea of storytelling, and people recognizing that every season is different,” he says. “I’m not saying that climate change is a good thing, but we need to start leaning back into the storytelling of wine, and if a vintage becomes part of that, and people are asking questions, then great. We can use that in the tasting room to engage people. We can use that as a talking point.
“Let us tell you about how this is different from other harvests and how different vintages are different. And then it gets them a little bit more engaged with the whole process of making wine. And that’s how people are going to really fall in love with wine.”
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