Feb 17, 2023, 9:49am PST
At 3.5 million tons, the 2022 California wine grape harvest is forecast to be the second smallest of the last decade, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. This marks the third straight year of under production in California. Vineyard owners are facing extreme weather conditions and an increasingly unpredictable future.
Yet for smaller, local vineyard owners like Susan Kimberlin, investments in technology to combat climate change feel out of reach. In 2016, Kimberlin bought a small vineyard southeast of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County with her husband, Steven Tamm, the former CTO at Salesforce. Its location brings humid, cooling winds from the Pacific via Bodega Bay. In theory, that should be perfect for winemaking. In practice, wildfires and heatwaves have damaged grapes and depressed harvests.
“I think that climate change is the biggest challenge for the wine industry of the last 2,000 or 3,000 years,” Brokemper said.According to UC Berkeley projections, Napa and Sonoma average annual temperatures could rise by as much as 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2100. The effects for winemakers could be significant.
That warming climate may be beneficial to some of his company’s vineyards, however. In January 2022 Henkell bought a 50-year-old vineyard in England. Until recently, English wine was the butt of jokes. Now, because of climate change, Brokemper said, it produces sparkling wine that resembles the product coming from the Champagne region of France just a few decades ago.
What does this mean for Northern California? Storchmann sees a gradual migration toward cooler regions, northward, at higher altitude and toward the coast, as unavoidable. “The Anderson Valley [in Mendocino County] may benefit,” he said. “Napa may not.”Susan Kimberlin and Steven Tamm’s 10-acre property sits in the Bennett Valley, part of the Petaluma Gap AVA.