The Future of Wine is Change: Re-Thinking Our Varietal Obsession

“What’s the grape variety?” is a question I’ve begun to hear a lot.

It’s my fault. In 2021 I decided to stop listing grape varieties on Centralas’s wine labels.
 

No grape varieties listed starting in 2021.

Grape variety is so fundamental to our understanding of wine in the 21st Century that its importance is taken for granted. I knew I was setting myself up to have nuanced conversations that might only lead to confusion and frustration with people who just want to know what they’re drinking.

(Of course this begs the question: Does knowing the name of a grape variety actually help you know what you’re drinking, or is it a misleading and limiting label that inhibits your understanding?)

I didn’t knowingly embark upon this Quixotic exercise in futility because of some sado-masochistic bent. I did it because of climate change.

Let me set this up a bit.

We started labeling wine by variety in the US only about 70 years ago. For eons prior to the 1950s, i.e. for the vast majority of wine history, specific grape varieties certainly had names but the wine was not named by grape variety.

Wine didn’t get named according to grape variety for all this time for some very good reasons.

First, most wine was made with a blend of grapes, and often other fruits, herbs, flowers, roots, honey, etc. Wine as a single grape variety beverage has really just been a recent fad, and may soon be (if my crystal ball isn’t out of whack) a passing fad.

Wine ingredients reflected local abundance and cultural practices. The purpose of wine was not to be a luxury commodity, but to preserve and add value to growing seasons in agricultural societies.

Diversity in agriculture was a pre-industrial way to have crop insurance. Planting a dozen different varieties of grapes ensured that even if you had a late frost, or a rainy summer, or an early snow and lost some potential harvest because of harm to some of the vines, you’d have other varieties of grapes that had later bud break, greater mildew resistance, or early ripening to beat these weather uncertainties. If you also had a diversity of fruit trees, berry bushes, and bees, your chances of having something to preserve with fermentation increased even more.

Also, implicit in not naming by grape variety is a perspective that views wine as a process and culture, rather than as a product and commodity.

Even in the US, vineyards planted in the 1800’s were often a variety of a dozen or more grapes. Some of these vineyards still exist because they were planted at a time when you had to plant ecologically – that is, in a spot in which the vines could thrive naturally because farmers didn’t have the resources and infrastructure to irrigate, fertilize, and use bottled solutions.

Starting in the 1950’s, the American wine industry fetishized and then capitalized upon and commoditized specific grape varieties to such an extent that varietal labeling became codified in labeling laws and embedded in our vineyards, literally. Industrialization had facilitated the clearing of forests, draining of wetlands, and planting of mass monocultures. We began planting single varieties of French grapes that came into vogue after WWII because of the fond memories of GI’s returning home from their service in Europe.

Now entire regions (like Napa), and even entire states (like Oregon), are known for monocultures of one or two varieties of grapes. This has been seen as a good thing – a “handle” for the consumer that allows for ease of marketing.

We have built “brands” of grape varieties. Most Americans will order a glass of Cabernet or Chardonnay without any concern for its provenance. “I’ll have the Cabernet.”

Enter climate change.

While our investments in single varieties of grapes has not changed, those grapes’ ability to be grown well or even survive is being tested by rapidly changing environmental factors. Generations of cloning the same vines has arrested the development of better adapted varieties.

The result is that regions built on monocultures take ever more and more extreme measures to attempt to ensure that their all-in bet on Pinot Noir, for example, does not turn out to be like putting all your chips on a single number on the roulette wheel, i.e. a sucker bet.

If a wine is branded by grape… what do you do when that grape no longer thrives?

The answer, sadly, is that you constantly replant new vineyards to replace prematurely decrepit vines and clear and exploit new regions where that grape might thrive. Meanwhile you must spray enormous amounts of chemicals, and expend exorbitant amounts of resources providing things like shade and water, to give life support to the grape where it currently grows.

Growers of high-end Cabernet in Napa install shade cloth to shield entire vineyards of grapes from the intensity of the sun on the southern and western sides of the rows. These same vineyards, planted on the hot, dry hillsides of the Napa Valley, must irrigate constantly with rapidly disappearing ground water. These are just a couple examples of the actions considered de rigueur to support a single variety of grape originally adapted to river banks in a much cooler and wetter climate.

Even if we see the writing on the wall for this kind of behavior and recognize its folly, because of our varietal obsession we will likely propose the wrong solution.

Our varietal obsession threatens to cause us to just seek the next newer and better variety of grape, rather than see that we need to think of wine as a process.

Change is inevitable and constant. So even if we were able to breed a new grape that was resistant to every known virus and mildew without spraying, and tasted exactly like Cab Sauv even with 3 months of 110 degree heat and 5 inches of winter rain, it would only be a matter of time until a new environmental condition occurred that it wasn’t bred to handle.

The point is that we need to stop searching for the Holy Grail of wine grapes and recognize that a thriving wine culture is a process of continual adaptation… it is a Quest that never ends.

Once we realize that the end is adaptability, not a newer better grape variety, we can begin to see the wisdom in branding things that can function as containers for constant change and adaptation.

Grape varieties cannot be these containers for change, because we may need to change the variety of grapes we use in order to incorporate newer, better adapted varieties. So this is why I’ve stopped labeling Centralas wines with grape varieties.

What kind of container for change should we use?

Location is an old one, and a good one.

For example, people generally don’t care that their Champagne is a blend of up to 6 grapes, or that Champagne (the region) recently changed their laws to allow a newer, better adapted variety of hybrid grape, named Voltis, to be used in the blend. Similarly, does anyone care that their bottle of Bordeaux may now contain 6 new hybrid varieties of grapes?

All of the new grapes approved in these locations were specifically chosen for their potential to flourish even in the less hospitable conditions caused by global warming. This is a triumph for regional, rather than varietal, branding.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to location branding. If a region were to become known for lower quality, it may hurt those who were standout producers. Another disadvantage is that a location brand doesn’t allow for the rugged individualism that we Americans prize so highly. What if I want to make a sparkling rosé in a region known for rich reds?

There doesn’t seem to be an obvious, one-size-fits-all solution to how to proceed once we release our attachment to grape varieties. Likely a hybrid of producer and location branding, with some exceptions, will be necessary.

But to me what is obvious is that to save wine we need to let go of our obsession with specific grapes, and maybe even with grapes in general, and embrace wine as a living process.