Chile can boast of being the largest producer of copper and one of the largest exporters of lithium. In addition to its mineral wealth, this South American country is also among the largest and most prestigious wine producers in the world.
During 2021, Chile produced 1,343 million liters of wine, 29.9% more than last year, according to the Final Wine Production Report 2021 of the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture, placing it as the sixth largest producer in the region. beverage.
The vast majority of this production, more than 1,000 million liters of wine, has a designation of origin.
Like other key crops for humanity, such as coffee or tea, the world’s vineyards are being affected by climate change. This is how it is hitting Chile and how wineries are responding to continue having wine in the future.
hit by drought
The Mediterranean zone in Chile, the most suitable for wine production, is located between the south of the Choapa River and the north of the Biobío River, with a marked seasonality of cold and rainy winters, and hot and dry summers, which has generated the ideal conditions for the existence of a great diversity of species of fauna and flora, almost a quarter endemic.
However, this area has been facing a phenomenon of extreme drought for more than a decade that is hitting wine production. The regions of central Chile —Metropolitana, Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins and Maule—, which concentrate most of the wine production, are among the most affected by this phenomenon.
Throughout Chile, less rainfall than normal was recorded during 2021, with a figure that fluctuates between 40 and 70% deficit. At 13 years, this is the longest and hottest drought the country has experienced since at least 1900.
This is a structural factor that Chilean winegrowers are learning to live with. This has forced the most important wine companies and small vineyards to adapt and develop new, more efficient irrigation methods that allow them to take advantage of literally every drop of water.
“We have a technological capacity, especially in our agricultural funds, installed technical irrigation, drip irrigation, which allows us to be very efficient in the use of water and to be able to address the challenges of drought in a very good way,” said Álvaro Gónzalez, director of the Viña Concha y Toro Research and Innovation Center, in an interview with Expansión.
Valentina Lira, the company’s sustainability manager, points out that the company’s initiatives for more sustainable irrigation began in the 1990s.
“At that time we started to switch to verified irrigation and drip irrigation. Today, 100% of the company’s vineyards are irrigated by a system that carries the water needed by the plant, drop by drop,” he tells Expansión.
This vineyard has a Research and Development program to try to make water use more efficient, so they have worked with micrometeorological stations to create crop coefficients for their production systems.
Through a digital platform, administrators of agricultural funds are provided with information week by week on the amount of water that the vineyards lose.
This is only a pilot program that began to be applied three years ago, but in the crops in which it has been implemented, it has allowed water savings of almost 18%. Lira points out that the company is aiming for zero water waste throughout the production chain, which includes cultivation, winemaking, packaging and transportation.
It also indicates that there are transfers of these practices, through agronomists, to small grape growers who are suppliers to the vineyard. “It’s a long-term strategy,” acknowledges Lira, because “these are things that require time to adapt.”
Another practice that the vineyards are implementing to survive the drought is to uproot all the invasive exotic crops —such as eucalyptus— that are inside or outside the property, since since they are not adapted to the central zone of Chile, they require more water than the species native.
“We removed eucalyptus from the hills and raised more than 2 hectares of chepica to make room for new vineyard areas as well as gardens of native species, with low water requirements,” Sebastián Ruiz, chief winemaker of Viña Tarapacá, told the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio . .
However, Chile has a climatic advantage: the Humboldt Current. This allows temperatures to remain stable compared to other wine regions in the world. This allows them to maintain the cultivation of traditional vines, such as Carmernere, which, although of French origin, is planted almost exclusively in this South American country.
“In Chile, unlike other wine regions, for example, we haven’t entered into vine change programs. In Bordeaux (France), they are experimenting with the test of other strains to face the problem they have due to climate change”, explained Gonzalez.
Lira admits that, although to a lesser extent than other regions, the Chilean wine region is also suffering and will suffer the effects of climate change, so there is also research work to make plants more resistant. “Our climate strategy focuses on mitigation, but also adaptation.”
Consumer driven changes
The sustainability manager points out that the entire value chain, not just wine production, should aim for more environmentally friendly practices.
For example, vineyards are normally neighboring areas of enormous biodiversity, so companies have an area that protects this aspect. In the case of Concha y Toro, the company has 4,200 hectares of protected native forest that accompanies the vineyards to increase their resilience and regulate their water cycles, according to Lira.
This company is one of the partner vineyards of the Wine, Climate Change and Biodiversity Program of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB) and the Universidad Austral de Chile, a project in which specialists in ecological sciences and wine producers collaborate to protect biodiversity from the Mediterranean zone of Chile.
For Lira, however, the great changes that the wine industry will undergo in the coming years will not be driven only by the need to adapt to climate change, but by the wine consumers themselves.
“This can cause the industry to receive new sustainability requirements, for example, wines with low water consumption, wines with low emission levels or zero associated emissions. We will also see changes in the packaging formats, the types of bottle”, explains Lira.
The directive states that packaging alone is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the wine production chain.
Although the changes in wine consumption are observed mainly in markets such as Europe or the United States, Lira believes that it is a matter of time before they reach Latin America.
