Bold cabernet sauvignon wines made Napa Valley famous. Now, hotter temperatures are starting to damage the grapes, so some wineries are starting to experiment.
Year-round wildfires, rising sea levels, scorching heat — we’re already experiencing the impacts. How much worse it gets remains to be seen, but there's hope — and a lot we can do.Late-summer heat waves are threatening Napa Valley's famed cabernet grapes, which produce some of the United States' most expensive wines. To survive in a hotter climate, winemakers are realizing they'll need to adapt.
"It is a big shift," says Elisabeth Forrestel, an assistant professor of viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis."Without the market changing or demands changing, you can't convince someone to grow something that doesn't sell or doesn't garner the same price." Winemaker Avery Heelan is growing several rare grape varieties at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley, in the hope that they'll blend well with cabernet grapes as temperatures get hotter.The vineyard is already at the hotter northern end of Napa Valley, but the extreme heat in recent years has been a wake-up call. A late-summer heat wave in 2022 hit temperatures just under 120 degrees at the vineyard, she says.
"Honestly, the more we experiment and learn about how to adapt, I think the wines are just getting better and better," she says.Farther south, Shafer Vineyards sits in the heart of Stags Leap, a Napa wine region that's known for high-end cabernets. Winemaker Elias Fernandez says the grapes benefit from a cool evening breeze that blows in from San Francisco Bay."This is effects of the heat," he says."It’s not maturing, so this is where you lose some fruit.
For now, he's not considering planting other grape varieties. With wines that are priced at $100 and up, cabernet is central to their business. "When you have these extreme heat events, you can have a lot of impact on the development of that flavor profile," she says."If it was just an average change, it would be a lot easier to manage.". Developed in the 1940s, it shows the ideal locations to grow different varieties of wine grapes, based on how much heat they receive. Napa Valley was originally indexed for cabernet sauvignon, but this could shift as the climate gets hotter.
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