Mild panic: will we still be able to drink champagne in the future?

It can no longer come as a surprise that cultivation and agriculture all over the world are facing enormous problems due to climate change and entrenched ways and habits. Take, for example, two of the drinks in my top three favorites, and the question is whether they will still be available many years from now: champagne and coffee. (Water is number one.) For me, that is undeniably a first-world problem, but for the people who make them, it is a disastrous threat to their livelihoods. That is why many producers are already working incredibly hard to make those livelihoods future-proof.

In the area of the champagne grape, for example, scientists and winegrowers are working hard together to find alternatives to the better-known (and only permitted) champagne grape varieties. This search is not a matter of ‘Hey, look what I happened to find in the bushes’, but a decades-long process of crossing varieties and testing the results, then trying to get them past the strict quality requirements…

New and old together

The Volkskrant features a compelling report by Eline Huisman, who went looking for the stories of people directly involved in the Champagne region. They are experimenting both with new grape varieties that are better able to withstand the devastating effects of climate change, which champagne producers are already suffering from, and with advanced technology. There is also a movement towards more environmentally friendly farming, for example by abandoning chemical pesticides, along with the conviction that production should be approached differently.

Back to basics

Cédric Moussé, whose champagne business has been in his family for generations and who lost 85 percent of his harvest this year due to climate change, says that in the 1970s his father, like many others, began using chemical pesticides. According to Cédric, that turned out to be a major mistake: the wine became heavy and watery in taste, and many men from that generation in the village developed prostate cancer. He now keeps things as pure as possible and is always looking for ways to make farming even more environmentally friendly.

Grape of the future

On a somewhat larger scale, there is the collaboration between the French agricultural research institute INRA and the Champagne committee CIVC. In the enormous open-air laboratory Plumecocq, agricultural scientists and winemakers are searching for ‘the grape of the future’, because they are all already experiencing the direct consequences of climate change and global warming: more diseases among the grapes, more extreme weather with thunderstorms and hailstorms that destroy harvests, and dry summers which, combined with the ‘mild’ winter temperatures, mean that the grapes that remain must be harvested earlier.

These grapes ripen faster and contain more alcohol, which ruins the fresh, acidic character that makes champagne so special (and delicious). It is therefore essential that grape varieties emerge that are better able to withstand all kinds of conditions, while still safeguarding the fantastic qualities of champagne.

Warming must be limited

The current situation is therefore untenable and calls for large-scale change in order to limit (in the words of agricultural engineer at the lab Sébastien Debuisson) the catastrophe for the Earth that this warming represents. The industry will have to adapt one way or another, and these experts are diligently searching, through propagation and crossbreeding, for a suitable grape for the champagne of the future. Of the six hundred new varieties that the committee is monitoring in the lab, they hope that three or four will emerge that can and may be added to the palette.

You want future generations to enjoy champagne too

And as Debuisson says, long-term thinking is important here: ‘We observe the plants, someone notices something interesting, we add it to our collection, follow it for a few years – and suddenly you are forty years further on.’ May I already hope that they will be successful, and that the generations after us will still be able to enjoy this drink of the gods? A very cautious and humble ‘cheers’, then…

Also read:

• ‘Frozen’ wine disaster: French vineyards catastrophically hit by frost
• South Africa has a wine surplus of 300 million liters. Who can help?
• With Coravin Sparkling, your bottle of champagne stays brilliantly fresh for a very long time

Source: de Volkskrant, read the full article here