Australia's wine future: Adapting to short-term climate variability and long-term climate change

Impact and Engagement

An understanding of short-term climate variability as well as trends in climate for the near and mid-term time scales will be provided in an accessible, usable form to grape growers and wine makers across Australia. Regional climate indices will be tailored for particular grape varieties and regions, with the focus on heat accumulation, heatwave and frost. Adaptation options to manage emerging risks in the near future and out to longer-term planning horizons will be identified.

Australia’s wine future is a collaborative research project, led by the Antarctic Climate Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACE CRC, UTAS) in partnership with the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA).

Project objectives are to:

• provide high resolution climate information in an accessible and useful form to the wine regions of Australia;
• assess historical and future changes in the frequency and intensity of large scale climate drivers (e.g. El Niño-Southern Oscillation) that drive drought and extreme heat in Australia;
• identify weather risks particularly important to grape growing within different wine regions (e.g.timing of heatwaves, frosts);
• assess inter-annual and decadal variability in these indices in seasonal forecasts and decadal predictions;
• develop region-specific indices of “heat wave” and variety-specific indices of heat accumulation (e.g. GDD, growing season temperature), and report the changes in these indices between current and future periods;
• assess the impact of these changes across different life cycle stages of grapevines;
• identify regionally relevant adaptation options to improve the sustainability of each wine region in the short, medium and long term as climate conditions continue to change;
• improve understanding and uptake of climate information to empower communities to plan for the coming season and the future.

In addition to providing climate information for all Australian wine regions, we are working closely with industry partners in six study regions - Hunter Valley, Grampians, Tasmania, Riverland, Barossa and Margaret River. In these regions we have identified the main weather and climate risks and assessed how these risks may change at a range of future time scales. We are identifying current approaches to managing weather and climate risks and determining how climate information might best be incorporated to manage risks into the future.

The project is delivering Information about near-term climate variability (2 months to 10 years ahead) and long-term change. The project legacy is an online electronic atlas, which will provide fine-scaled climate information in an accessible, usable form to grape growers and wine makers across Australia. This will help industry identify the most appropriate adaptation response within each region,increasing the competitiveness of the Australian grape and wine industry in both the short and long term.