Climate Change Forces French Vineyards to Alter the Way They Make Wine
Growers change grape varieties and reshape the landscape to protect some of the world’s most valuable vineyards from warmer temperatures
4 min
BORDEAUX, France—The wildfire began on an usually dry summer day in a forest bordering the Liber Pater vineyard. Winemaker Loïc Pasquet saw the flames rise and spread toward his precious vines, which produce Bordeaux that sells for $30,000 a bottle.
Hours before evacuating Mr. Pasquet and his staff destroyed the grass around the vineyard to prevent it from catching fire and dug trenches to block the blaze’s path. He also sprayed local trees with water drawn from the vineyard’s ponds. The vineyard was spared.
The emergency measures are just some of the steps winegrowers are taking to survive in a region that is home to some of the world’s finest wines and sharpest temperature increases. Many growers are harvesting weeks before grapes traditionally ripen; others are investing in land located in cooler climates. Some are transforming the landscape of wine country itself, planting more trees to ensure better water retention, and less erosion and runoff after heavy rain.
The situation has become so dire that winemakers in Bordeaux and other regions have begun to change practices that have been in place for generations. Winemaking is tightly regulated in France with rules governing everything from the location of specific appellation to its grape content.
This year vineyards around Bordeaux were allowed to irrigate their vines, a practice that is usually forbidden. The French organization that governs wine appellations also recently approved six more grape varieties to be added to the grapes currently allowed for the production of Bordeaux wines. The new additions include four reds—Arinarnoa, Castets, Marselan, and Touriga Nacional—and two whites, Alvarinho and Liliorila. All were chosen for their ability to thrive in warmer, drier conditions.
“It was crazy,” said Georgie Hindle, a wine expert who covers the Bordeaux region at wine publication Decanter. “No one knows if this decision will change the profile of a classic claret.”
In February, United Nations climate scientists published a report stating that surface temperatures in the Mediterranean region—which includes Southern France—have already risen 1.5 degrees since the preindustrial era. That is higher than the average increase of 1.1 degrees for the entire planet, according to the U.N., exposing the region to higher risk of heat waves, droughts and other extreme weather events.
Wine grapes are highly sensitive to changes in the climate. Sunshine warms and ripens the grapes, producing sugar that converts to alcohol. Too much sun risks burning the grapes. It also heightens the alcohol levels, leaving the wine unbalanced and giving its fruity notes the taste of jam.
Wine connoisseurs say the best wines are produced at the northern limit of where the grape is a viable crop, giving the fruit time to mature and for complex flavours to develop. A handful of small growers have begun investing in land in areas that were once regarded as too blustery for vineyards, including Brittany and Normandy along France’s Atlantic coast. But established châteaux say relocating production to different regions is problematic. Regulations require growers to label their bottles according to the appellations or areas where they are produced. That means authentic Bordeaux wines cannot be produced outside the swath of terroir, or specific soil, that surrounds rivers that feed the Gironde estuary in Southwestern France.
“We’re talking here about making fine wine,” says Mr. Pasquet. “You can make wine anywhere in the world—but a number of precise details go into making fine wine.”
This year unusually warm spells in some places in March caused early budding of the vines, leaving them vulnerable to a wave of late frost in April. Growers installed massive candles throughout their vineyards to warm their fruit and used helicopters to disperse stagnant air.
Then came the summer drought, which forced much of France to undertake water restrictions as rivers up and down the country ran dry.
On average, grape harvests now happen up to three weeks earlier than they did 30 years ago, according to winemakers’ unions. This year winegrowers in the prized Languedoc-Roussillon area started the harvest period at the end of July while in parts of Corsica it began in early August—both several weeks early.
“We started in August. That’s never happened before,” said Pierre-Olivier Clouet, technical director of Château Cheval Blanc in the Bordeaux area.
Cheval Blanc has responded by moving into agroforestry, planting hundreds of trees among the vines—a technique borrowed from the history books. Mr. Clouet said the trees provide shade, improve soil quality and allow the vines to suck up more water. A flock of sheep now roams among the vines, fertilising the soil, while a new artificial lake on the property adds moisture.
In the region of Isère, winegrower Nicolas Gonin said his decision to uproot the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines planted decades ago and replace them with local varieties was vindicated this year. “It is better to increase the number of grapes that you grow,” he said. “They have different characteristics, and when one has a tough year, the others can do well.”
Many of the changes are still experimental. Some growers are modifying the density of their plots to require less water while others are collecting rainwater during the winter to boost their irrigation systems. Planting vines at a different angle, some say, can reduce their exposure to punishing sunlight. Many growers are also planting vine roots that are more resistant to drought and delay the maturity of the fruit.
In cooler times, growers used to cut the leaves of their vines so they would get the maximum amount of sun and more alcohol content. Now the leaves go untouched to better protect the grapes, preserving the fruit’s acidity. One grower said he uses machines that draw alcohol out of his wine so that it isn’t too strong.
Some winemakers, including in Champagne, in the North of France, say it has still been an excellent year. Younger vines have struggled, but the older plants with long roots have performed well, producing small grapes with thick skins that contribute flavour and colour to the wines as well as staving off diseases such as mildew.
“For now the impact of global warming, we feel it—but it’s not yet a negative impact,” said Brigitte Bâtonnet, of Champagne producers’ group CIVC.
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Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.
4 min
What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?
At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.
Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.
Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.
A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.
Escalating expenses
One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.
One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.
Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.
Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.
“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.
Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.
Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.
“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.
Parent trade-offs
If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.
When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.
The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”
Emotional labor
For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.
Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.
“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.
Lost productivity
The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.
Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.
Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.
Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.
Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”
Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.
Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
