Winemakers have to adapt as Oregon's wine country heats up

Oregon is prime wine country, especially the rich agricultural valleys between the Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

But as the climate changes, growing conditions may not be as favorable for the region’s best-known, highest-quality wines, like pinot noirs. They’re made from a red grape that’s ideal for the historically cool climate of the Willamette Valley, which runs south of Portland from the Columbia River.

Summers and falls are getting hotter and drier. From 1980 to 1984, the region averaged about 25 days a year where the temperature went above 85 degrees, according to climate mapping by Oregon State University. But between 2020 and 2024, there were closer to 60 days per year that exceeded 85 degrees.

I started a tour of Oregon wine country in one of the Willamette Valley’s most favored wine-producing regions, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA — or American Viticultural Area — about an hour south of Portland.

Pulling up to the stately Björnson Vineyard on a cool, rainy morning in mid-March, vineyard-owner Mark Björnson insisted we start in the tasting room to get a little warmth into our blood.

“We’ll pour you some Pinot Noir,” Björnson said. “Pinot noir is the flagship grape of the Willamette Valley.” It was smooth, well-balanced, and delicious.

Next, we headed out to the vineyard — 107 acres of trellised vines and forest marching across rolling hills, which mostly face south and west for the warm summer sun.

“We grow 14 different varieties of grapes,” Björnson said. “A lot of those grapes would have been just about unthinkable 20 years ago, like Cabernet Franc, Chenin Blanc. But we’re getting them ripe now, because things are getting warmer.”

Things are getting a lot warmer.

“In the last five years, we’ve had three years of climate scares,” said David Patte, owner of Sun Break Wines, which produces pinots, chardonnays, sparkling ciders, and vermouths using grapes from Björnson’s vines.

“2020 saw the wildfires in the Cascades that brought smoke into the Valley,” Patte said. “And I personally made some red wine that year. It didn’t turn out very well. Had kind of an ashy aftertaste.”

Patte was able to sell some of that vintage in bulk at a steep discount. Many winemakers had to throw their reds out that year. White wines can be more resistant to wildfire taint, because the grape skins, which absorb smoke residue and toxins, are not used in the winemaking.

Another increasing climate change threat is extreme heat events, said Greg Jones, owner of Abacela Winery in Southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley. Jones started his career as an academic climatologist and still conducts oenological field research. He also publishes a newsletter for fellow West Coast winemakers, Climate of Wine.

“The heat dome in 2021,” Jones recalled, “It was 118 degrees in my vineyard, 126 up in British Columbia.”

Under that strain, said Jones, the grapes can be damaged.

“They’ll essentially scorch from the sunburn and they’ll turn into a raisin,” he said. “If the vines do some wilting and burning of the leaves, then you can stall photosynthetic activity.”

At Oregon State University’s Climate Change Research Institute, geography and environmental sciences professor Erica Fleishman has been tracking the growing environmental disruptions.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when pioneering winemakers began experimenting with grape-growing in the Willamette Valley, Fleishman said conditions were different.

“It was cooler; a wet season that often lasted more predictably later into the spring; more snow at higher elevations surrounding the Valley, coming down to the lower elevations during winter,” she said.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and “many of the extremes are not something that the agricultural industry in this region has experienced over the past one hundred years or so,” Fleishman said. “We are getting longer heat waves, hotter heat waves, more frequent heat waves.”

But, there’s a big caveat here. Up until now, warmer average temperatures in summer and fall have mostly helped grape-growers.

“In some cases, climate change may benefit the wine industry,” said Fleishman. “Historically, the temperature here was a little bit too cool. And so up to a point it’s been beneficial, because it is a little bit more reliably warm.”

However, that beneficial effect might start to diminish. Climatologists predict the region will keep getting hotter, with more frequent extreme heat and fire events that can seriously damage the grapes and threaten winemakers’ profitability.

Mark Björnson remains optimistic there’ll still be a viable wine industry, and that he’ll still be making high-quality pinot noirs in 20 or 30 years.

He said his investment in the land and the vines is for the long haul.

“We’re mitigating: We have three big solar arrays, regenerative farming, keeping a permanent cover crop, building the carbon in the soil. Most of the property is actually in forest and storing carbon,” he said.

In Southern Oregon, where conditions are already as hot as parts of California and getting hotter, Jones is diversifying.

“We have planted some Portuguese varieties,” Jones said. “We’re growing Touriga Nacional, Tinta Cão, Tinta Amarela. Some of these varieties perform exceptionally in the hottest years where we are, but then they do pretty good in the cooler years too.”

But there are significant challenges to this strategy.

“It’s a long-lived crop,” Jones said. “You plant a new vineyard today, you’re wanting at least 50, 60, 70 years from it. So you need to be able to plant with a vision toward the future. The challenge is how variable the climate is today. How do you plan for something like that?”

Right now, growers are getting ready for a more immediate challenge: the 2026 growing season.

“[This is] one of the historically lowest years in terms of snowpack,” Fleishman said. “Snow is usually our reservoir for water across the western United States, and our snow reservoir is running dry. And one of the reasons we have less snow is that it’s been near-historically warm across the western United States this winter.”

All of which means water shortages and wildfires may be in the cards again this year.