In the small village of Bovense, on the Danish island of Funen, Jacob Stokkebye makes wine in a grain barn built in 1931. A relative newcomer to viticulture, he planted his first vines back in 2009. For three years, he poured most of what he made down the sink.
He’s since perfected his craft. Stokkebye’s wines have made it onto a stellar cast of menus, including at Geranium and Alchemist, two decorated restaurants in Scandinavia. He’s adding another 4,500 vines this year, which will bring his total to more than 21,000. His stated ambition is to do for Danish sparkling wine what Noma did for food.
The Swedish Wine Association, meanwhile, expects the total vineyard area of the country to grow by roughly 19% — from 185 to 220 hectares — by the end of this year. It’s been well documented that, as the planet continues to warm, wine will move north. That’s no longer industry conversation. It’s happening.
At the same time, France is tearing out nearly 28,000 hectares of vineyards. The government is paying €4,000 per hectare for the privilege, all to shrink the country’s wine-producing footprint by about 4%. Of those vines being pulled, some 83% are for red wine grapes, and about 65% carry an AOP designation. That latter detail is telling, because it means those vines don’t represent industrial surplus from some forgotten corner of France. They’re appellation-classified land. France has decided it no longer needs them.
A team of researchers at the University of Geneva published a study in March that modeled where European viticulture might be headed, mapping climate analogues to identify where a given vineyard’s conditions in 2040 or 2080 will resemble today. The finding confirms what everyone already suspects: viticultural suitability is shifting north and upward on average about 2,100 feet higher than today.
The part getting less attention is what else is moving north with it.
Ask anyone who tends to vines and they’ll confirm, humidity can be the enemy of every grape variety that stems from vitis vinifera, the predominant species of grape used for wines around the globe. That’s because these grapes typically evolved in climates that are dry during the growing season. For that reason, humidity introduces pressures that the grapes find tough to handle. The researchers found that factors like heat and sunlight are what determine where wine can be grown. They also found that as temperatures rise, those suitable areas are shifting northward.
But pathogen-related indices, the ones tracking moisture, precipitation, and fungal disease pressure from downy and powdery mildew, create a separate and overlapping problem. They produce major east-west displacements that the temperature models miss entirely. Factor in disease risk rather than just heat, and the potential for northward vineyard expansion is drastically limited.
Put much more plainly: Many of the places that initially looked viable for winegrowers in a warming-world are exactly the places where conventional wine grapes will struggle most to stay alive. Northern Europe is getting wetter. Higher elevations are getting more precipitation. In a high-pressure disease year, susceptible vinifera varieties like Riesling, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sauvignon Blanc, required 14 fungicide applications in German field trials to maintain healthy fruit. The economics of conventional viticulture in those climates tend not to work.
Two maps, two different futures for wine
Which brings us back to Stokkebye. He’s grown a lot of Pinot Noir, and it makes for a really lovely story because it taps into existing romanticism around the tradition of so-called fine wine. But his flagship wine is actually Solaris, a cold-hardy, disease-resistant hybrid grape that accounts for the bulk of his production. Why? Because it’s the grape that actually performs in Scandinavian conditions. In fact, across Sweden, Solaris and varieties like it account for roughly 60% of all plantings.
More than that, though, is that Solaris will be better cut out to deal with the changing climate. Today’s Scandanavian weather won’t be the same as tomorrow’s. And that’s the thing the northward-expansion narrative tends to omit. Vitis vinifera can move north, but only so far. The varieties that will likely survive the humidity are the ones with non-vinifera genetics.
There’s an irony here in the fact that the grapes best positioned to survive what’s coming are the very grapes the elite in wine world have spent the better part of a century ignoring — calling them too “foxy” to drink, among other things.
But the hierarchy behind wine is now being undermined. It’s not by critics or consumers (not yet, at least) but by weather. The varieties the establishment deemed lesser are, it turns out, better equipped for the world the establishment helped create.