The biogeography of winegrapes reveals unexploited adaptive capacity to climate change

Abstract

Winegrowing has always benefitted from a biogeographical perspective. Sub-appellations, appellations, and larger regions variously delineate and group areas based on their local climate, traditions and cultural practices. This approach has helped winegrowing in many ways. It has brought a savoir-faire on how viticulture practices can best exploit local conditions, and focused consumers on the environmental connections between vine and wine. At the same time, however, it has limited the flow of information and knowledge sharing across regions. 

While knowledge has always been shared well across a certain distance, anthropogenic climate change has dramatically increased the spatial scale that regions must consider. As climate change transforms regions, adapting in place requires growers to have more information on how different varieties, rootstocks and cultural practices perform in different climates (Wolkovich et al. 2025a). In this talk I focus on the potential of variety diversity to help regions adapt to climate change, and mitigate losses with increasing temperatures and extremes (Wolkovich et al. 2018, Merrill et al. 2020).

Anthropogenic climate change has dramatically warmed winegrowing regions, with Europe seeing by far the biggest shifts. Increases in heat extremes and growing season warmth in recent decades in Eastern and Western European winegrowing regions have outpaced changes in all other regions globally, and exceeded predictions for end-of-century (2100) warming under a high emissions scenario (Wolkovich et al. 2025b). Growers need to find ways to adapt—quickly and in the face of uncertain forecasts. I review previous work on how shifting varieties with warming can dramatically change projections of the ‘loss of winegrowing regions’ across the globe (Morales-Castilla et al. 2020).

Yet, how successfully we can transform these results into helping growers decide how to adapt is still painfully limited by data and our approaches. Because most regions are dominated by a limited set of ‘international’ varieties, missing early-ripening and, even more so, late ripening varieties, we have limited insight into most varieties (Wolkovich et al. 2018, 2025b). Beyond this uneven sampling of varieties, the matching of varieties to ideal climatic zones provides another hurdle to using existing data to predict shifts with continued warming. However, new modelling approaches can overcome some of these issues (Wolkovich et al. 2025a).

Focusing on Europe, I use new modelling approaches that can work across uneven sampling to show that different varieties have different thermal optima, and outline the implications of this variation for variety selection. Surprisingly, these results highlight the importance of the lower temperature response of development, which controls predictions for poleward and elevational shifts. They also suggest how growers may select a portfolio of varieties that match multiple aspects of the temperature response of different varieties. While these models have still only been applied to a subset of varieties, they have the potential to integrate far more varieties, and also compare clonal and variety-level differences, given additional data.

The biogeographical tradition of winegrowing could overcome this gap through larger collaborative initiatives alongside these improved modeling approaches. Such an approach could revolutionize our understanding of rootstock by scion by environment interactions and address other questions critical for adapting winegrapes to climate change, including how climate affects quality, and how extreme events versus mean trends impact yields and crop resilience.

References

Merrill, N. K., García de Cortázar-Atauri, I., Parker, A. K., Walker, M. A., & Wolkovich, E. M. (2020). Frontiers in Environmental Science, 8, 516527.

Morales-Castilla, I., García de Cortázar-Atauri, I., Cook, B. I., Lacombe, T., Parker, A., Van Leeuwen, C., … & Wolkovich, E. M. (2020). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(6), 2864-2869.

Wolkovich, E. M., García de Cortázar-Atauri, I., Morales-Castilla, I., Nicholas, K. A., & Lacombe, T. (2018). Nature Climate Change, 8(1), 29-37.

Wolkovich, E. M., Rouleau‐Desrochers, C., García de Cortázar‐Atauri, I., Walker, M. A., & Lacombe, T. (2025a). Plants, People, Planet, 7(6), 1611-1620.

Wolkovich, E. M., Cook, B. I., García de Cortázar-Atauri, I., Van der Meersch, V., Lacombe, T., Marchal, C., & Morales-Castilla, I. (2025b). PLOS Climate, 4(5), e0000539.