Climate change pushing winemakers to blend wines from different years

In the world of wine vintage is king. If you are buying a bottle of red, white or rosé then the specific year of the grape harvest is almost always written on the label.

By contrast, non-vintage still wine – that made by blending two or more years – is seen as very downmarket, something cheap and not cheerful. And it is significantly rarer.

Yet with climate change hitting vineyards around the world with more extreme weather, a small but growing number of quality-conscious wineries are releasing non-vintage bottles so they can make a more consistent wine.

Chris Howell is the winemaker at Cain Vineyard and Winery in California’s celebrated Napa Valley region, 50 miles (80km) northeast of San Francisco. He has been in the job since 1991, and he says that summers have got noticeably hotter.

“Weather is a complicated thing,” he says. “The issue people are focused on most in Napa are dramatic heat spells, heat waves that generally come throughout the summer, particularly in late summer.

“They have been around for as long as I have been here, but the peak temperatures of these are higher. The heat can be intense. You can get as high as 50C, something near to that.”