A vicious,
four-year drought may be close to catching up with California's winemakers, and
it's the small producers of inexpensive wine that are likely to be hit hardest.
It’s
too soon to call a wine shortage, but California’s ongoing drought is causing
problems for Napa’s famous vineyards. The AP
reports that
vines are ripening early, while farmers, heeding the call to
conserve water,
are planting fewer crops:
Vineyard owners are pruning earlier than usual and on a shorter
schedule, Domenick Bianco of Renteria Vineyard Management said.
If the Valley does not see late winter or spring rains, 2014
will yield a smaller crop.
“Water amount determines yield. If you use 80 percent less water
than last year, you could see 80 percent of the crop,” Bianco said.
We’ve
been warned that this kind of thing could start to happen. A study
from last year predicted
that, as a result of climate change, traditional wine country regions like Napa
may experience sharp declines in production by 2050. Other regions may end up
benefiting from their new climates — Vermont vintners say rising temperatures have allowed
them to produce new, warmer-weather varieties — but, as with coffee, wine is one of those fragile
commodities that will get hit hard by climate change, and could end up serving
as a bellwether for what’s to come.
You Might Also Like
Many
winemakers do have access to underground aquifers, which will keep them in
business for the time being. But Napa’s looking ahead to a future where water
resources are further limited. E&E News has more from a recent
gathering of over 100 local grape farmers:
Growers are also worried about next year’s supplies. As a
perennial plant, the grapevine takes two years to bear fruit, so buds that
emerge this year won’t ripen until next year. A dry year this year could
hamstring bud development, said Mark Matthews, a viticulture professor at the
University of California, Davis.
“What we really haven’t seen that could happen is, if it’s dry
enough, grapevines actually become damaged and start to die, so you don’t get
the buds you need for the 2015 season,” he said. “That potentially could become
devastating, and it’s not like when you’re growing corn or something when you
can just plant again next year. It’s a 30-year commitment.”
“This is becoming more frequent, whether we like it or not,”
said Buckland.
The California
drought has left some vineyards with a fraction of their usual water allotment.
State Water Project allocations hover around 20 percent of normal, while the
San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts are delivering no more than 30-35
percent of normal supplies, according to Jay Lund, professor and blogger for
the University of California-Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.
Meanwhile, the
drought is pushing up costs for producers. To keep prices attractive,
winemakers have cut costs or faced losing their customers to foreign wines or
craft beers.
High-end producers in Napa Valley
can accept lower grape yields in exchange for better flavors, but the same is
not true for wineries that make cheaper wine and sell grapes by the pound.
While people typically think of cheap wine producers as being big firms, many
of the largest producers actually buy their grapes from small, independent
farmers in the San Joaquin Valley.
W. Blake Gray, the California editor
of online publication Wine-Searcher, has watched the wine market change over
his career. He said that the up-and-coming generation of wine drinkers—people
in their 20s with their first full-time job—now have alternatives to cheap
wine, such as craft beer or sake, to pair with fine dining.
Compared with most other crops,
grapes are drought-tolerant. But they aren't invincible. Wallace and Gray said
extended periods of high stress can cause vines to stop producing fruit
eventually. And while older, established grapevines can burrow 100 feet into
the soil to look for water sources, without rain to flush the soil regularly,
salt can build up and poison the plants.
"They will shut down and save
themselves, and stop producing fruit to save energy," Gray said.
"It's not like the San Joaquin Valley will shut down overnight. But we
will need a torrential downpour for a couple years in a row. In the same sense
the vines didn't didn't immediately shut down, they aren't going to immediately
jump and recover."
During his annual visit to California's wine
country, civil rights attorney, Sean Erenstoft spoke with Napa wine growers
about drought-tolerant vines and the tough decisions facing the industry. He visited properties where the decision had
already been made to let the vines fail on acres of land in which supplemental
watering was otherwise required. The decision
to let a parcel go without water "is like letting your children go without
a meal" Erenstoft reports. Many of
these vines are decades old and have served the family business with their
yields of fruit and thereby sustain the effort of winemaking. While the vines of California are remarkably
tolerant to drought (particularly the Zinfandel), there is evidence that the
plants are producing less fruit. If this
trend continues, we may likely see the prices rise even more precipitously than
we already are.
