Local Matters this week is about the consequences of the drought in Luxembourg. We had Marc Weyer at the microphone, president of the association of Luxembourg’s winegrowers, to talk about the impact of the drought on the vines.
Ara City Radio: It hasn’t rained for a few weeks now, what are the consequences for the plants and for the wine-producers?
Marc Weyer: We already had quite a dry winter, the water stocks were relatively empty - after having had a very rainy summer last year – spring was dry and we lack rain in general. The vines in general like the sun, but they need water from time to time. Meanwhile there is a real lack. All those young cultivations, those that are younger than 10, 12 years, do suffer, respectively locations where the ground is not very dense, or where the earth is heavy, with big rifts, wide enough to put your arm inside, the problems are not to deny. It will have an impact on the harvest. Even if rain came now, some parcels are damaged in so far that late rain wouldn’t help anymore.
If you say, you see the impact. Which concrete impact do you see on the plants?
The very young cultivations, that are in the first, second, third year of yield, or even three, four, five years, these plants haven’t developed enough wood to sustain the coming years. So, even in the next years, there is lesser yield. Even cultivations which seem to be okay, when you look closer you see that the grapes are not developed that firm, then we have wilting foliage. We have very young plants, where the shoots have regressed, they have stopped growing.
What about older plants? Those that are older than 10 years. Do they manage to find water somewhere?
The roots of older plants go down a few metres – if they find the right ground – they manage to withstand for a while. But there is no rain coming in the next weeks. The longer this drought is lasting, the more fatal are the consequences. If we don’t have rain until harvest, I don’t know what is to come, these are very bad prospects.
Is it possible to compensate the lack of rain with artificial watering?
It is possible to compensate this with irrigation. But you’d have to install the watering system. So far, that has not been necessary in our latitude. In the median of the past 20, 30 years, we had enough rain. But in the last 5 years, we had four rather dry years – except 2021. Everything was drowning last year, we had 100, 200 litres a day. And this year, we hadn’t had not even 100 litres during the whole summer. Yes, you could water the vineyard artificially, but these extreme conditions make planning very difficult. And you need the water. And you need to bring it to the plants. This is quite some work. Five litres per plant and watering cycle, that’s a lot. In other regions, in the south, they are more experienced with watering. We haven’t needed it before. So we have to make the experiences.
On a longer term, do you or do the winegrowers think about adapting to the new conditions?
Yeeeeah, not so easy. If we want to produce Riesling, we want Riesling. We want to keep the stylistics of our wines, which is our specialty. So, you can’t really just change the plants towards those that need less water. And those too have to be watered. Merlot and all the others. That’s our challenge for the future, with the whole climate change. Where does this lead and when is the turning point. How can you estimate the longer evolutions to come? There is an index called Huglin that says which grapes you can cultivate within which weather conditions, but this is not so easy to determine. It is certain, that we won’t be able anymore to cultivate whole areas densely with plants. We will have to work the soil more to make it more loosen. But this also means when there is a lot of rain, the risk of erosion is higher. In general, we will have to produce more hummus in the ground, carbon in the soil, not in the air. I think that we will manage in the next years, but when there is a dry year like this one, it is difficult. We might have to adapt time of harvest; the challenges are vast.
Photo: Bob Jones / Vineyard at Wyken Hall / CC BY-SA 2.0