Why Winemakers Must Embrace Sustainable Growing Practices

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Winemakers work outdoors in high season in long verdant rows. A deliberate slow rhythm marks their days as they examine vines and grapes, monitor trimming, and plan for the harvest. Then come hours of communicating with the team, analyzing lab work, checking on cellar activities, and assessing fermentation tanks — all of which evaluate quality.

A simple way to think about winemaking is to consider balance: assessing the wine’s pH level to measure ripeness in relation to acidity, or evaluating the wine’s aroma and flavor.

But the climate crisis has upended a necessary balance for winemakers and their crops. No longer are grape yield, composition, and wine quality a certainty with the backdrop of earlier season warm temperatures, which are shifting the entire cycle of wine grape growth. Budding, flowering, fruit-set, ripening, and harvest now tend to occur ten days to two weeks earlier than in previous generations or even years.

Increases in temperatures mean that alcohol content rises, acidity levels lower, and tannins are less refined. Learning to adapt to such fluctuations can present a competitive advantage or a dismal twist of fate. In nearly all economies of the world, agriculture is among the most climate sensitive sectors of the economy, and premium wine grape production is among the most climate sensitive of all agricultural crops.

The impact of climate change in fine wine has become one of the most pressing concerns for wine producers, collectors, and investors alike. What are the implications of global climate change for the wine industry?

What is Life Like for Winemakers?

Deep green wine bottles whir along in a neat row. They twist and twirl through the mechanical line as if they were practicing a perfectly timed dance. It is an art and craft where one learns how to discern taste, blends, aging, filtering, and packaging. Each vintage comes with unique challenges and surprises.

Winemakers have other names: vintners, enologists. Some universities convene viticulture and enology curricula.

Whatever their title or discipline is called, those who create wine are responsible for overseeing the entire production process. The art and chemistry of winemaking includes responsibilities that range from growing and harvesting the grapes to sanitization and data logging. The time it takes a product to go to market depends on the context of wine style, so that making wine is often a year or longer process, even after fermentation.

“At its core, that’s what winemaking is all about — conducting series after series of trials to optimize the process and outcome,” Nicole Hitchcock, head winemaker at J Vineyards & Winery, explains. “I start most of my days [during harvest] early, visiting vineyards at sunrise to assess fruit ripeness and vine condition,” Hitchcock says.

At harvest time vitners take fruit samples, monitor growth, and provide potential harvest estimates to know the incoming fruit amounts. Afterward, they’re ready to do a taste evaluation of micro pressing and fruit assessments for pH and sugar levels.

The Pressures of Climate Change on Winemaking

The grapevine vegetative cycle is highly controlled by temperature, which governs the cycle, including the harvesting time. The optimal temperature for the vineyard growing season commonly varies between 12°C (53°F) and 24°C (75°F), and temperatures that fall beyond this interval can damage vines, mainly by causing heat stress and harming productivity.  With many wineries “having frank conversations with consumers about the effects of climate change within their vineyards,” Rob Giles, the director of beverage at New York City’s Beefbar, admits, “in 2025 we will see consumers demand more transparency with regards to wine.”

Memories of extreme weather and their consequences weigh heavily on winemakers. The emergence of new pests and diseases and the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and hail, challenge wine production in many regions.

In 2020, nearly 10,000 wildfires burned 4.3 million acres in California. The wildfire smoke in Northern California tainted wine grapes in the region, making some of them unusable since smoke-tainted wine usually tastes like burnt embers.

An unprecedented hurricane in Asheville, North Carolina devastated Plēb Urban Winery in 2024. A Go Fund Me campaign has raised $52,953 for them.

Water availability is another important factor in viticulture management. A leading European winemaker has recently warned they may have to abandon their ancestral lands in Catalonia within 30 years because climate change could make traditional growing areas too dry and hot.

Confronting such challenges, many winegrowers are embracing sustainable practices.

Case Studies: Sustainable Winemaking Practices in New York State

Elisabeth Forrestel, an ecophysiologist at the University of California, Davis, explains the importance of thinking not just about the expected average temperature and precipitation in the future, but thinking about the extremes of climate change. Existing producers can sometimes adapt to a nature-infused pace inherent in levels of warming by changing plant material like varieties and rootstocks, training systems, and vineyard management. However, these adaptations might not be enough to maintain economically viable wine production in all areas.

“We will soon start to see regions once known for a specific variety being replanted with varieties more conducive to the new environment,” says April Busch, the wine director of Manhattan’s Passerine.

For example, rather than focusing on using as little water as possible as some regions out West may need to do, New York needs to focus on water runoff into lakes, rivers, and the Atlantic Ocean to ensure that water that runs off from vineyards does the least amount of harm. In fact, farms can become certified under initiatives such as the New York Sustainable Winegrowing program. More than 50 are certified, which requires that growers improve practices like bettering soil health and protecting water quality of nearby lakes.

• Hunt Country Vineyards in New York state has adopted underground geothermal pipelines for heating and cooling as well as composting.
• Hundreds of solar panels powering 90% of the Fox Run Vineyard’s electricity are the most obvious feature. Other initiatives are more subtle, like underground webs of fungi used to insulate crops from drought and disease.
• Vinny Aliperti, owner of Billsboro Winery along Seneca Lake, has helped establish communal wine bottle dumpsters that divert the glass from entering landfills and reuse it for construction materials.
• Matthew Spaccarelli—who won the 2023 John H. Brahm III Grower Award for Dedication and Contributions to the New York Grape Industry in that year’s Unity Awards— acknowledges “having a certification like USDA Organic doesn’t mean your community is healthy. It doesn’t mean that your employees have sustainable wages. That certification is just about what materials you’re putting on your plants,” he says.

Sweeping cuts to federal environmental policies are certain to halt several sustainability initiatives. Tax credits for solar panels comprise nearly half of over $400,000 in upfront costs, in addition to some state and federal grants. It will be difficult to increase solar production, but he said he won’t have enough money without those programs.

Experts argue that developing policies is essential to support the wine industry’s transition to a more sustainable and climate-resilient future. This includes funding research and development of new technologies; implementing regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; offering financial incentives for winemakers to adopt sustainable practices; and promoting the adoption of renewable energy by highlighting the environmental impact on the wine industry and the potential benefits of transitioning to renewable energy sources.