Tim is one of the few South African writers with an international name and reputation. This is his 2013 WINNING entry:
On the slopes of the Skurfberg, Basie van Lill’s vineyards endure the summer. The grape-ripening season is often brutal on this rough mountainside beween Clanwilliam and the Atlantic, far north of Cape wine’s historic heartland, but most years the vines triumph, and a few renowned wines are made from their hard-won grapes.
Wine farmers in Stellenbosch – even more in cooler
Constantia and Elgin – would only with difficulty
imagine growing fine grapes in this implacable heat, without the luxury of
irrigation, a miserably low rainfall the only source of water for the vines. The
unthinkable may have to be confronted before many decades have passed: chances
are good that viticulture on the Skurfberg, already a marginal exercise, will
become impossible, and that areas like Stellenbosch will themselves move into
the harsh zone of marginality.
Earth’s climate is changing, as its surface temperature rises,
and the Cape winelands will share in the consequences. In their 2008 “Climate
change strategy and action plan”, provincial government authorities noted that
there is “little doubt that the Western Cape will face some degree of climate
change, which is expected to be evident by as early as 2030”. That
generalisation is comparatively easy to make – though serious science lies
behind it, but the complexity in modelling future change, and quantifying its
effects on the interrelationships producing weather patterns, makes precise
predictions for specific areas impossible. Change itself, change consequent
upon global warming – and change that will mostly be for the viticultural worse
in South Africa – is the one overarching certainty to which Basie van Lill and
other grape-farmers will have to respond, as best they can.
A recent paper by Lee Hannah and colleagues in the journal
of the United States National Academy of Sciences reveals the bewildering (to
this non-scientist at least) intricacy of the research and calculation involved
in forecasting future climate patterns. An array of approaches “driven by 17
global climate models” was deployed to geographically chart climatic shifts in
wine-growing regions around the world – and that was just the methodological starting
point. The resultant mapping of the Western Cape is, though, starkly clear in
its implications. Large swathes of areas currently suitable for viticulture are marked as showing significantly decreased viability
by mid-century: much of the West Coast (the Swartland and Olifants River
regions), down through Paarl and Stellenbosch, as well as the Breede River
Valley further inland.
Scientists are generally agreed that, as SJE Midgley and E
Lotze of Stellenbosch University suggest, mid-century climate projections for the
region “include warming by 1-2°C, reductions in frontal autumn and winter
rainfall, and a contraction of the winter season”.
The devil is ever in the detail, and the devil already allows
researchers glimpses of the flick of his forked tail. As in the vineyards spreading
out from the Breede River, whose long stretches of lush, heavy-bearing greenery
produce a substantial proportion of South Africa’s wine (nearly 40% of the
Cape’s vines are here). Water is their lifeblood – vast amounts of it,
collected in dams which tap the flow of the river from the Ceres Valley down to
the Indian Ocean. One academic investigation (by AC Steynor and others) states
drily enough that it is “evident that climate change will have a significant impact
on runoff in the Breede River”. Stephanie Bester of the University of
Stellenbosch is scarcely more dramatic in her research conclusion that “there
is an imminent water shortage looming which will worsen in the future”. There
could easily come a disastrous point where – given competition for increasingly
precious water resources – copious vineyard irrigation in the Breede River
Valley will become untenable, with water simply unavailable, or at least scarcer
and made less economically viable through increased cost.
Water shortage will be a crucial component of climate change’s
effect on the Cape’s wine industry. Less rain and more drought are likely to be
accompanied by higher temperatures (both maximum and mean), perhaps encouraging
vineyard pests. More heatwaves can be expected in summer, hail and violent wind
in winter – “extreme weather events” as the jargon of climate change has it. Shorter,
warmer winters will also affect quality through reducing the extent to which
vines can enter proper dormancy for a useful period. More benign winters are
also likely to have complex consequences for vine diseases. And will increased
levels of carbon dioxide in the air be significant for vine physiology and
growth? No-one seems sure.
Response to the challenges posed by anthropogenic
(human-caused) climate change must be governed by two imperatives: adaptation to
changed conditions, and mitigation through reducing emissions of gases responsible
for the enhanced “greenhouse effect” that is ineluctably leading to the changing
world climate. South Africa’s substantial contribution to emissions of “greenhouse
gases” is made primarily through industry and coal-fired power stations.
Agriculture’s – and the wine-industry’s – contribution is significant, however,
both through its direct use of carbon-derived fuel and electricity as well as through
such aspects of wine production as packaging (especially glass bottles) and
transport.
Mitigation moves are
already under way in the wine industry, but will have to be undertaken with
increasing urgency. In 2008, the local wine and fruit industry, according to
the “Confronting Climate Change” website, “launched a carbon footprint study to
enable SA growers and service providers to determine their carbon footprint and
identify carbon hotspots with the objective of finding creative measures to
reducing carbon emissions”. A few individual wineries have already gone far in
this direction: Backsberg, in Paarl, in 2010 became the first South African
winery to achieve carbon neutral status by sequestrating its carbon emissions.
Many estates are already responding to threatened water
scarcity by reducing winery consumption and recycling it, as well as switching
from wasteful methods of irrigating vineyards, like overhead spraying, to less
profligate ones. Further adaptation to the conditions brought about by climate
change is without doubt going to involve radical and complex transformation, more
crucially affecting viticulture than work in the cellar. This is where those
Skurfberg vines, producing fine wine in adverse conditions, might offer helpful
clues to the wine industry.
What can be learnt from such vineyards that might be relevant
to areas adapting to a harsher climatic regime? Many of the chenin blanc and
semillon vines that grow there are old – at 30-50 years, old by South African
standards, at least. “These bush vines survive”, says viticulturist Rosa
Kruger, something of a specialist in old vines, who knows these ones well,
“because they’re the right vines in the right place, properly cared for. Vines
don’t like extremes, and these have grown old because they’ve adapted, with
extensive root systems and restricted vigour.”
The vines’ adaptation is twofold. As older vines that had to
struggle to become established, that were forced to send their roots down deep
in search of moisture, they became relatively inured to the vicissitudes of
harsh seasons. But it is likely (there is no certainty as yet) that the vines
growing here represent a century or two of adaptation to local conditions. Can
it be an accident that the oldest vineyards in the Cape – a few are a hundred
years old – are mostly planted to semillon, chenin blanc, palomino and muscat?
These were among the earliest varieties grown after the Dutch planted the first
vines at the foot of Africa in the 17th century, and they have had a continuing
presence. For much of the 19th century, semillon was almost ubiquitous outside
Constantia; in the 20th century, chenin blanc was to become by far the most
planted variety. There can be no question that local adaptations occurred over
the years, as the most suited vines survived best and were propagated by
farmers, especially in the earlier years before stocks were generally supplied
by commercial, dedicated nurseries. We know that a uniquely local version of
semillon became widely established in all areas in the nineteenth century – the
evidence is manifest in the red rather than white grapes borne by the mutation (there
are red and white versions intermingled in an old Skurfberg vineyard on a Skurfberg
farm not far from Basie van Lill’s).
Some years ago, leading viticulturist Francois Viljoen, Consultation Services manager for the producer organisation VinPro, first
alerted me to the potential significance of old Cape vineyards – of many
established varieties – and the extraordinary value certain vines within them
might contain in their acumulated adaptations. Although the need is growing for
research to identify, isolate and promote such adaptations of important grape
varieties to local warm, dryland conditions, it does not seem that the academic
branch of the local wine industry, or the industry as a whole, is as yet taking
the need sufficiently seriously. Once climate change is doing its worst, it
might be too late.
Choosing the right vines for the right place, as Kruger puts
it, will be ever more important in the warmer vineyards of the future. As the
vineyards’ conditions change, so too, gradually, must the nature of plantings shift:
as well as the genuinely indigenised grapes, varieties from Spain, Portugal,
southern Italy and Sicily, themselves adapted to conditions of heat and
drought, should become more commonly grown. Local winelovers (themselves
adapting!) will come to recognise on local labels names now rare or
non-existent: tempranillo, mascarello, nero d’Avola, touriga nacional, and
others. Where the highest quality is sought after, it could well be that, for
example, pinot noir and chardonnay, and the best sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon, will be increasingly
confined to regionss that remain comparatively cool – and that is more likely
to be south-coast areas like Elgin and the Hemel-en-Aarde valley than Stellenbosch.
Gazing into the decades ahead, much must remain guesswork
when it comes to detail, but the broad pattern of likely change is clear. It’s
worth noting, though, that in a real sense there are two Cape wine industries
rather than one, as there are in most large wine regions. There is, first, the
viniculture that produces large volumes of wine destined primarily for sale on
supermarket shelves. Grown mostly on high-yielding, irrigated vines in warm
areas, this is sometimes called “industrial” wine. “Artisanal” wine,
contrastingly, attracts most attention from glass-swirling, aroma-sniffing
critics; commanding higher prices, it is less dependant for profitability on
high yields and large volumes. Boundaries between the two industries are
inevitably blurred and they have much in common but climate change in the
winelands is going to affect them differently.
The quality of wine now coming from Basie van Lill’s Skurfberg
vines is extremely high, but the yields of vines suffering heat and drought are
inevitably low, and only those that are not pushed to bear heavily have a good
chance of survival. Such vineyards are not economically viable unless the grapes
can command a good price, which in turn implies wine costing more than the
supermarket buyer – whether in Johannesburg or Stockholm – is willing to spend.
For fine, characterful wines there will always be a market, however, albeit a
limited one. Perhaps the wine industry needs to be even more thoughtful and
planful about the high-volume, low-margin wines at present dependent on
threatened water supplies
“We’re sitting with gold in our old vineyards – vines adapted
to our climate, our sun and our soils”, says Rosa Kruger. The soil is stable,
but the climate is shifting, our sun more punishing. Times will become hard for
many grape-farmers in the Cape as the century moves on. It would be satisfying
if one crucial tool for survival could be found within the Cape’s vineyards
themselves; even more so if survival could also mean more distinctive, more
authentically local, wine.