Happy Friday, and welcome to Food Fix! I’m Chase Purdy, a name some of you might recognize from my past work covering food politics and business at Politico (alongside Helena before she started this newsletter) and Quartz. These days I’m thinking and writing a lot about wine – though probably not the kind you’re most familiar with – for my own newsletter, Grape Rush. I’ll be your guest host for today’s issue of Food Fix – I’m excited to be in your inboxes. (By the way, the newsletter was off last week for the Fourth of July holiday).
Oh! And I welcome your questions and/or feedback! Feel free to drop me a line at: chase@graperush.co.
Alright, let’s get to it –
Chase
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Wine’s twin troubles reveal something revolutionary
The world of wine is grappling with two existential challenges. The first is the industry’s inability to attract young people. The second is climate change. In both cases, a bubbling resurgence of a bunch of long-ignored grapes could very well present solutions.
Let’s start with the climate: Wine grapes have been struggling. We’re still a few months ahead of the 2024 harvest, but wine growers and makers around the globe are crossing their fingers that it goes a little smoother than the last few seasons. So if you like to drink wine, say a little prayer for vitis vinifera, the species of grape from which virtually all wine is made – both red and white.
Take Italy, for example. In 2023 alone, the world’s top wine producer stared down a 20 percent to 24 percent drop in total wine-grape yields compared to the prior year due to climate-related issues. In the first eight months of 2023 the country registered 2,664 extreme weather events, and it registered 3,192 in all of 2022, according to the European Severe Weather Database. By contrast, only 787 were logged 10 years ago.
And the Italian wine industry has taken notice.
“It is precisely in these strange years that all technical and scientific knowledge must be put into play to mitigate the damage of an increasingly crazy climate,” said Riccardo Cotarella, president of the Association of Italian Wine Technicians, in a statement about the 2023 harvest.
Global context: It’s not just Italy. Spain, the world’s third-largest producer of wine, in 2023 suffered a year-on-year loss of about 16 percent of its wine grape yields. French wine grape production was relatively stable in 2023, a welcome reprieve from a tough two-year stint when production took a similarly sized hit. And in California, vintners in and around Sonoma County breathed sighs of relief after a reprieve from three straight years of crippling drought, disease and wildfires that destroyed or tainted millions of pounds of grapes.
What might surprise you: Remember, the grapes that essentially fuel the entire wine industry are from a single species called vitis vinifera. And over the centuries, these vines have been tamed by vintners who’ve coddled, controlled and copy-pasted them, leaving them little room to evolve to a changing climate. In fact, many vintners today rely on a battery of fungicides and repeat sprayings every harvest just to keep the vines alive in the warm, humid weather where fungal diseases take root. In short: v. vinifera is, in some regard, on life support.
A new hope: La crosse. Seyval blanc. Traminette. Marquette. Baco noir. Brianna. These are a handful of the grape varieties we should become more familiar with.
Because here’s the thing: v. vinifera isn’t the only species out there. It’s just the one Europeans have long prized and popularized. And as global demand grew for wine, everyone wanted what they were familiar with. It’s why we’re growing Sauvignon Blanc and Cab Sav everywhere, from Australia to California to South Africa.
We’re not certain how many grape species exist. v. vinifera has Eurasian origins, but at least 65 species have been discovered across Asia. In North America, some 25 species are known, including six native varieties: v. rotundifolia, v. aestivalis, v. riparia, v. labrusca, v. mustangensis, and v. rupestris. Unlike their v. vinifera cousin – which grows almost exclusively between 30° and 50° north and south of the equator – those native varieties have been left alone in the world, free to evolve to a changing climate, particularly in geographies too cold or too hot for v. vinifera. Because these non-vinifera grapes are so resilient to fungal diseases and weather swings, they offer a roadmap for how the wine industry might adapt.
There’s a fascinating history here: Winemakers in the early U.S. (think Thomas Jefferson and folks of his era) actually did play around with some of the wild grapes they stumbled upon, along with hybrid grapes, which are crosses of those native varieties with v. vinifera. There’s also an interesting backstory to how grapevine rootstocks native to the Americas helped save French vineyards during a catastrophic Phylloxera disease crisis in the second half of the 19th century. Ultimately, though, Prohibition-era regulations wiped out the young native wine industry in the U.S. And when winemaking did make its comeback, it was in the image of European v. vinifera wines such as Chardonnay, Merlot and Pinot Noir.
Hope bubbles over: More and more people are beginning to experiment with making wine from these more versatile grapes – the movement is gaining steam in Europe, the United States, and even in Japan, accelerated by academics (including at the USDA), scientists and the next generation winemakers. These hybrid grapes are imbued with the evolutionary power to resist certain climate challenges, and the winemakers working with them are getting better and better at turning them into tasty wines.
That other existential threat to wine: It’s fascinating that the industry hasn’t figured out how to capture and secure the interest of people living the middle third of their lives. And it’s especially interesting when you consider that the buying habits of these consumers are shaped, in part, out of concern for the changing climate.
Full disclosure, I’m in my late-thirties (Helena and I actually share the same birthday), which incidentally makes me the kind of person the wine industry loses sleep over. The truth is – curious as I am about wine – I don’t have a developed palate for it. I’m not alone: The rate of people under 60 choosing to drink wine is on the decline. This is something that drew me to start my newsletter, Grape Rush, which explores these existential threats and what comes next. In the last decade, direct sales in the U.S. shrank by 5.5 percent for people between 50-60; by 7.3 percent for those between 40-50; and by 1.2 percent for people in the 30-40 age bracket, according to Silicon Valley Bank, which tracks and finances the U.S. wine industry.
New grapes, new day? Despite these challenges, in the U.S. we’re seeing innovation and an expansion of winemaking to places far beyond Napa and Sonoma. These non-traditional wine grapes are being grown in surprising places like Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and New York. And that expanded footprint provides the wine industry with an opportunity to tell a new story about wine to a new generation of wine drinkers. It’s an idea that’s being touted by a national group based out of Brooklyn called ABV Ferments. (That’s “Anything But Vinifera.”)
This change won’t happen overnight, but keep it on your radar. And next time you’re in a wine shop, ask the shopkeeper if they have any hybrid or native grape wines. You just might be pleasantly surprised by the taste and the story behind it.
More wine, please: To keep up with this growing story, subscribe to Grape Rush!
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What we’re reading
Expand SNAP or hike crop prices? Congress is locked in a farm bill fight. (Washington Post). “Congress could promise farmers new guaranteed minimum prices for their crops, as it considers sweeping new agriculture legislation. Or lawmakers could provide more generous aid to help needy families afford to buy food. But they don’t seem to be able to agree on doing both,” writes Jacob Bogage this morning.
‘Unconscionable’: Connecticut SNAP benefit thefts surge by 1,800% (CT Mirror). “The theft of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as SNAP benefits or food stamps, jumped from $132,455 in the 2023 fiscal year to $2,584,662 in FY 2024, according to state Department of Social Services data — a 1,800% increase. The number of thefts reported grew from 177 in January to 2,855 in June,” reports Kaitlyn Pohly. “Criminals commonly obtain EBT card information — the card number and the owner’s PIN code — through skimming devices placed on top of the point of sale device, Connecticut DSS Deputy Director of Communications Christine Stuart told The Connecticut Mirror.”
In the face of wine’s woes, a little dose of romanticism (The New York Times). Wine writer Eric Asimov penned an appreciation piece about wine. It begins with him saying the “wine world is feeling besieged and stigmatized,” by negative health-related stories, by climate change, and declining consumption rates. It’s interesting, to be sure, but through the lens that I’m approaching wine, it feels like he’s leaving out some of the more interesting and optimistic ways in which wine is evolving. I’d love to see more coverage of hybrid and native grape wines, and the folks behind them.
When life serves you smoke tainted wine grapes…make BBQ sauce? (wein.plus). That’s what’s being reported out of Oregon, where a winery in the Willamette Valley used smoke-tainted wine that wouldn’t be great for drinking to make BBQ sauce. Smoke taint is an especially gnarly issue for wine industry folks in California. And there’s a policy connection, as dollars for research into smoke taint have started showing up in draft proposals of the U.S. farm bill.
How to help Americans eat less junk food (New York Times). “There is little reliable guidance available for people who don’t have the time, patience or skill to analyze the dense nutrition labels on food packaging,” write Kat Morgan and Mark Bittman in a guest essay. “What could help is a system giving consumers important nutrition information at a glance on the front of a package: a warning sign that a high-sugar soda or breakfast cereal product, for example, is an unhealthy choice. The bold move here would be to steer people away from food that’s bad for them. These kinds of labels, of course, are the last thing most large food manufacturers want on their products. But a few countries, mostly in Latin America, have begun to require or encourage such labeling, and there’s some early evidence that it’s already having a positive effect on the way people eat.”
Medicaid is paying millions for salty, fat-laden ‘medically tailored’ cheeseburgers and sandwiches (STAT). “They’re marketed as healthy, ‘dietitian-approved’ meals and delivered directly to the homes of people seriously ill from cancer, diabetes, or heart disease: a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage breakfast sandwich, biscuits and gravy, a cheeseburger. These are among the offerings sold by an Idaho-based company, Homestyle Direct, which is paid millions of dollars each year by taxpayer-funded state Medicaid programs to deliver what the company calls medically tailored meals,” reports Nicholas Florko. “The company’s ability to bill Medicaid for meals loaded with sodium and saturated fat – some of which could be bought in the grocery store at much lower cost – raises questions about federal and state oversight of meal delivery programs for people mostly confined to their homes, which are operated under a provision of the Medicaid program known as a Home and Community-Based Services waiver.”
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The regular author of Food Fix, Helena Bottemiller Evich, is out on maternity leave. Food Fix will feature a series of guest writers through July. Send feedback and story ideas to editorial assistant Lauren Ng at lauren@foodfix.co.
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