Extreme weather and falling demand are pushing wineries into the red

By Anna Cooban, Claudia Colliva, Maya Szaniecki and Danielle Wiener-Bronner, CNN Updated 11:54 AM EST, Sun November 19, 2023

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Jordi Ustrell expects his vineyard’s tinder-dry plants to produce about half of their usual 15,000 bottles of wine this year.

“That’s a big loss,” the interim chief executive of Celler Devinssi, a small winery in the Spanish town of Gratallops, told CNN.

Ustrell is one of scores of European winemakers struggling to grow enough grapes as extreme and unseasonable weather becomes more commonplace. High input costs and declining consumption are adding to the woes of small, independent wineries.

According to the International Organisation for Vine and Wine (OIV), an industry group, global wine production is set to fall to its lowest level since 1961 this year, hit by soaring temperatures and extraordinary flooding. Fueling that decline are expected drops of 12% and 14% in output in Italy and Spain, the world’s biggest and third-biggest producers in 2022, respectively.

Climate change is having a “tremendous” impact on wine production, Giogio Delgrosso, head of statistics at the OIV, told CNN.

Delgrosso said that, in the past, extreme weather would strike every few years to interrupt long stretches of healthy, abundant harvests. “Now extreme climate events are always happening. Every year there’s something.”

This year, heavy rainfall has helped mold spread through vineyards in central and southern Italy, while a severe drought and soaring temperatures have blighted vineyards in Spain.

Other major wine producers, including Australia, South Africa and Chile, are expected to suffer drops of between 10% and 24% in output this year, according to OIV data, as floods, wildfires, droughts, and fungal disease have hammered vineyards.

The changing climate is helping others, however. Output in the United States, the world’s fourth-largest producer, is forecast to grow 12% this year. Greg Jones, a climatologist and chief executive of Abacela, an Oregon-based winery, told CNN that, half a century ago, the state couldn’t grow grapes. Now, he said, rising temperatures have made Oregon “one of the top producing regions in the country.” (Visit CNN Business for the full article)