Radishes do not inspire the same attachment, and that difference helps explain a growing challenge for the wine industry. As temperatures rise, wine growers may need to change the grapes they grow or even move to new regions.
But wine drinkers are often attached to familiar grape varieties and famous wine regions.
A new study from Cornell University explores this challenge and shows that the biggest factor may not be the changing climate itself, but how consumers respond to these changes.
Why wine is different
A vegetable farmer can switch crops and lose almost nothing. A wine grower cannot.
The grape and the region are half the product, and people refuse to let go of them.
Scientists have bred tougher vines for a hotter world, but few growers plant them, because buyers keep reaching for familiar names.
“Wine grapes are unique in that people are very attached to certain cultivars and the sense of the place where they come from,” said Justine E. Vanden Heuvel, professor of horticulture and one of the study’s authors.
“That’s not true with most other crops. Do you care where your radish comes from?”
Buyers love tradition
That attachment shows up at every price level.
“Wine around the world has this tradition of having on the label the name of the grape and where it came from,” said Bradley Rickard, professor of food and agricultural economics.
“Even inexpensive box and jug wine has the name of grape and place of origin on the front, and even among less-sophisticated consumers, there’s recognition of that.
“This paper is trying to understand if changing anything about that formula – whether the grape, the location or the production method – can affect what consumers are willing to pay.”
A vineyard is not a one-season gamble. Planting it can cost more than 200,000 dollars per hectare before the first real harvest, and it may then produce for 30 years.
So a grower today is betting on the weather decades from now. The researchers added up every future dollar of income and cost to see which strategy pays off best.
What the heat does
Extreme heat can damage grapes. When temperatures get too high, grapevines struggle to produce energy, and the grapes begin to lose their color and quality.
In very hot conditions, the grape cells can even become damaged.
During heat waves, grapes exposed to direct sunlight can become extremely hot. Researchers have measured grape clusters reaching about 136 degrees Fahrenheit.
At those temperatures, grapes can lose flavor and color. For Cabernet Sauvignon, extreme heat can reduce harvests and change the taste of the wine.
Cooling the vineyard
The first option allows growers to keep growing the same grapes in the same place. Instead of changing the vineyard, they protect the grapes from extreme heat by placing shade cloth over the vines.
This helps keep the fruit cooler, especially during heat waves.
The study found that shade cloth could greatly reduce crop losses during very hot years. However, installing and maintaining these systems can be expensive.
Vineyards Benefit from Furry Friends
Even so, consumers responded positively to the idea.
When people learned that a wine producer used shade cloth to protect grapes from extreme heat, they were willing to pay about 17 percent more for the wine.
That was the largest price increase among all three strategies studied.
Trading tradition for resilience
The second fix changes the grape. Instead of Cabernet Sauvignon, growers could plant a heat-tolerant variety such as carignane, a grape that performs better in hotter conditions.
It sells for less than half of cabernet’s price, but it grows more than twice as much fruit, so the income lands close.
Better still, its harvest barely drops in a brutal summer while cabernet’s collapses. Drinkers paid about 12 percent more for the switch.
The high cost of moving
The third fix changes the address. A grower could move the same cabernet vines to a cooler region nearby, like Lake County, where land costs far less. The problem is the label.
Cabernet from Lake County sells for under a third of the Napa price, so moving paid the worst in nearly every case.
The lesson is striking: a carignane grown in Napa is worth more than a cabernet grown elsewhere, so place matters even more than the grape.
Consumers may reward adaptation
The team learned this by surveying more than 300 American wine buyers.
Each saw the same wine twice, once plain and once with a note about how it was adapted to the heat, so the researchers could measure what that story was worth.
“It is safe to say that consumers are beginning to understand how climate change is affecting wine production,” said Alex M. Susskind, professor of wine education and management.
“And they appear to be willing to pay a price premium as wine makers adjust to the new their normal.”
There is a catch. Those extra dollars probably fade.
People lose interest in green selling points over time, so the team assumed the boost would hold for only the first few years.
The whole case for adapting leans on that early enthusiasm.
No single strategy
So which door should a grower choose? It changes with the weather.
If warming stays mild, plain cabernet in Napa still wins. Under moderate heat, the shade cloth earns its keep.
In the worst case, the tough carignane comes out ahead.
That is the real message. Adapting a vineyard is not one fix you install and forget.
It is a string of bets on an uncertain future, each weighed against drinkers who may or may not stay charmed by the story on the bottle.
The Cornell team cannot erase that uncertainty, but it gives growers a clearer way to weigh it.
