This year is on track to be one of the worst in the history of Italian vineyards in the last century, the result of a ruinous fungus plaguing grape vines.
Italian wine country in the spring experienced unusual heat and heavy rainfall, right as grapes in many vineyards began to form. Those conditions created a perfect opportunity for humidity-loving plasmopara viticola fungus to spread, causing a disease known as downy mildew.
That contributed mightily to a 12% reduction in grape yields overall — or about 1.1 billion gallons of wine — this year compared to the year prior. It’s a decline that, for the first time in nine years, likely means Italy will drop to second place on the list of the world’s top wine producing countries. France will regain a crown it lost almost a decade ago.
“The one we are facing is a very complex harvest, characterized above all by the effects of climate changes,” said Riccardo Cotarella, president of the Association of Italian Wine Technicians, in a statement.
Cotarella went on to explain that the decline in yields by Italian vineyards were also caused by a mix of floods, hailstorms, and drought.
“It is precisely in these strange years that all technical and scientific knowledge must be put into play to mitigate the damage of an increasingly crazy climate,” Cotarella’s statement said.
In an interview with Reuters, Fazil Dusunceli, a Rome-based officer with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, said Italy in the first eight months of 2023 had registered 2,664 extreme weather events. In all of 2022, the nation registered 3,192. Only 787 were logged just 10 years ago.
The need for contingency plans are clear, and among them Dusunceli called for more investment in disease-resistant strains of grape.
To that end, work is being carried out by researchers to discover how hybrid grapes — those vitis vinifera varieties crossed with non-vinifera indigenous varieties — might help solve some of the problems vintners are facing today. Studies have been promising, including this one in Crimea, this one in northern Italy, this one by Bulgarian researchers (PDF), and this one in the United States (PDF), and others.
Still, there is much work to be done to explore where hybrid grapes should be grown to bear the best results for a finished wine product. Some of this research is already underway in California, where one winemaker has planted 50 varieties across the state in a large-scale experiment to find where certain hybrid varieties perform best.
Even as France reclaims its top ranking for wine production — if even for just a year — no one is popping too many celebratory bottles of bubbly. Vintners there are dealing with their own headline-grabbing issues.
A confluence of shifting consumer behaviors, China drinking less western wines, and climate change, has the French government planning to spend millions of euros to encourage winemakers to uproot their vines this year. The idea is that, in a year over overproduction, it’s best to maintain the price of French wine by actively controlling the amount of wine that gets to market in the first place.
On the front of making wine in an era of climate change, Europe is making inroads with evolving practices. And with the growing of hybrid grapes, the French government this year approved Bordeaux and Bordeaux Supérieur appellations to grow disease-resistant vines, though they cannot account for more than 5% of any vineyard’s planted area.