Warming Ripening French Wine Grapes 2-3 Weeks Faster Than 50 Years Ago; Agroforestry May Aid Growers

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Wine grapes grown in an alley cropping agroforestry system at the Restinclières research farm in southern France. Image by Erik Hoffner/Mongabay.

MONTPELLIER, France — As the world warms due to climate change, winemakers are struggling to maintain the quality of their product. But in the home of wine, agroforestry researchers are showing that growing “vines among the pines” can help growers adapt. Higher average temperatures speed up the ripening of grapes, which leads to lower acidity and increased sugars in the fruit, yielding higher alcohol levels in wine and altering other compounds in grapes that affect aroma and flavor.

“Wines are becoming fuller-bodied, more alcoholic, and riper in flavor,” as one Italian grower told Bloomberg in late 2019, and this is a problem for winemakers who want to market particular wines with established characteristics. As the climate warms, this is becoming increasingly difficult and the best growing regions for many kinds of grapes are shifting northward toward the U.K., Germany and Sweden, in Europe’s case, and toward the Pacific Northwest from California in the U.S. Growers typically can’t move their vineyards, though, so some are opting to grow new grape varieties that are more tolerant to heat or drought.

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Curious to know how these agroforestry-grown grapes performed after I saw them in the spring, I contacted INRAE senior researcher Christian Dupraz. “The 2019 harvest was very good, high quality,” he said during a recent Skype interview. As the founder and coordinator of agroforestry research at Restinclières, called Programme Intégré de Recherche en Agroforesterie à Restinclières dans l’Hérault (PIRAT), he personally planted the vines here back in 1996 and coordinates on-site research to this day.

This was a very good result indeed since the region experienced a heat wave in late June that hit 44° Celsius (111° Fahrenheit) in the shade, causing many vineyards in the region to be damaged (both leaves and grapes were “burned”) — but not at Restinclières, likely due to the presence of the trees. If that is a result of the trees, says Dupraz, “This would be an excellent incentive for vineyard agroforestry … and three years ago we had a late frost and among the trees we had no frost damage.” Of that latter event, I was told during my visit that most vineyards elsewhere in the region had entirely lost their crops, and it was suggested that Restinclières went unscathed perhaps due to the trees creating a microclimate of slightly warmer air that was trapped between their rows.

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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/06/better-wines-among-the-pines-agroforestry-can-climate-proof-grapes-french-researchers-show/