The Château Domenà of Unknow region

While vineyards are managed one vintage at a time, farming practices take a longer view. A survey of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers members found that, on average, about 90% wanted more education and resources for water conservation, climate resilience and climate-smart farming opportunities. This grant will go a long way to help provide those resources. ‘Farmers are by nature risk averse,’ said Molly Williams of Napa Valley Grapegrowers. ‘Climate change poses considerable risks. We aren’t plantin ...

As the summer season comes to a close and many wineries prepare for harvest, more than 400 active wildfires continue to burn in British Columbia, a handful of which the BC Wildfire Service designates ‘a potential threat to public safety’ in major cities, small towns and the vineyards in between. Sparked on 15th August, the season’s most destructive wildfire – the McDougall Creek Fire – had the province’s wine industry on its knees. Spreading over 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres), it initially thre ...

‘When I started producing wine, the wineries were all in a very bad condition,’ said Askaneli Brothers president Gocha Chkhaidze, recalling the poor state of the Georgian wine industry shortly after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘There was inadequate sanitation, a lack of know-how and old-fashioned bottling lines. People were unable to make wine sustainably, vineyards were not sufficiently cared for, agronomists were unskilled and used to harvest the maximu ...