Climate Change Could Enhance Bordeaux Wine Quality, Study Finds

Warm summers and wet winters are the perfect combo for growing good grapes, according to the study.

And climate change could make the perfect conditions more frequent, likely improving the quality of wine in Bordeaux.

University of Oxford researchers compared 50 years of wine critic scores for Bordeaux bottles with the weather in the region that year.

Wines from the area in southwest France appear to have improved in quality between 1950 and 2020.

The team found high-quality wine was grown in cooler, wetter winters and warmer, wetter springs. As well as hot, dry summers and cool, dry autumns.

Andrew Wood, University of Oxford, said: “Weather drives wine quality and wine taste.

“We found evidence that temperature and precipitation effects occur throughout the year—from bud break, while the grapes are growing and maturing, during harvesting, and even overwinter when the plant is dormant.

“Perennial crops like grapes are there all the time, and so things that happen outside of the growing season can also impact the wine.

“The trend, whether that’s driven by the preferences of wine critics or the general population, is that people generally prefer stronger wines which age for longer and give you richer, more intense flavors, higher sweetness, and lower acidity.

“And with climate change—generally, we are seeing a trend across the world that with greater warming, wines are getting stronger.

“With the predicted climates of the future, given that we are more likely to see these patterns of warmer weather and less rainfall during the summer and more rainfall during the winter, the wines are likely to continue to get better into the future.

“The problem in scenarios where it gets really hot is water. If plants don’t have enough, they eventually fail, and when they fail, you lose everything.

“But the general idea or consensus is that the wines will continue to get better up to the point where they fail.”

Vineyards can produce wine of varying quality, despite coming from the same vines, land and produced using the same methods annually.

The team compared high-resolution climate data with Bordeaux critic scores from 1950 to 2020.

They looked at the quality of wine across the region, as well as the more specific areas with defined methods of production – otherwise known as “appellations d’origine contrôlée,” or AOCs.

Models were applied to test whether the wine quality was impacted by the weather, such as the length of the season and the shifts and ranges in temperature and rain.

Unlike previous studies, this one investigated the weather’s effect during the winter season, when vines don’t tend to grow grapes.

Bordeaux was picked as a region that relies on rainfall or irrigation and has long-term wine score records.

Wine scores are subjective and critics know what grapes they’re testing, but they usually agree on what’s good and bad wine.

As a result, the authors say quality is “a non-subjective property of perennial crops” that could help monitor long-term changes in crops.

They noted the improvement in the region could be due to climate change, but also using more technology, and winemakers increasingly matching their techniques to what the consumer wants.

The researchers, writing in iScience, are keen to study other regions and perennial crops such as cocoa and coffee. 

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