The ethical drinker: Inside the debate on wine and water use

Our relationship with water: The missing link

Two rivers in California, the Klamath and the Colorado, which act as vineyard lifelines, have been legally recognised as living beings, with the same legal rights as people under local indigenous law, in 2019 and 2025 respectively.

This recognition reflects the growing global spread of the indigenous worldview, another example being the growing number of Māori-owned wineries in Aotearoa (New Zealand), such as te Pā, Tiki and Kuru Kuru.

The bestowal of ‘personhood’ encapsulates the core of indigenous knowledge, an ancestral respect for the Earth and its ecologies.

One guiding principle is that you take only what you need. This is the missing link in our modern relationship with water. We no longer worship it; we commodify it.

'Freshwater irrigation of a luxury crop isn't viable'

Water now dominates the global wine conversation. I’ve been writing about this for a decade, including in a 2019 UN-commissioned paper on why freshwater irrigation of a luxury crop isn’t viable.

Distracted by the glare of solar panels and the hum of electric tractors, this truth is glossed over.

As I wrote in my paper, in the New World, 83% of the area under vine is irrigated, as opposed to 10% in the Old World. For wineries that practice irrigation, it accounts for most of the winery’s water footprint.

Is dry farming the answer?

The most ancient indigenous water-conservation tradition is dry farming.

When it comes to grape growing, this isn’t just about not irrigating, but a holistic system of practices to create deep-rooted vines, water-retentive soils, balanced canopies and more. Implemented effectively, dry farming can lead to drought-resilient vineyards, healthy yields and terroir-driven wines.

As Lauren Pesch of Leeds & Pesch Vineyard Consulting in Napa Valley, who advises vineyard owners on dry farming conversion, explains: ‘Dry farming is an ancient technique that is gaining renewed attention as we seek to adapt to changing climates and resource challenges. It’s about cultivating a deeper, more resilient plant that can consistently produce exceptional fruit.’

Adrian Bridge, managing director and chairman of Taylor’s Port, says that dry farming has been used in Portugal’s Douro region for more than 300 years.

He suggests that its concentrated wines and Ports would be ‘diluted’ by irrigation and that the practice would be ‘counterproductive to the quality that we produce’.

John Paul, founder of Oregon’s Deep Roots Coalition and winemaker at Cameron Winery in the Dundee Hills, says that ‘irrigating grapevines is a decision based solely on increasing returns on investments, not on increasing quality’.

Lauren Pesch’s father Frank Leeds, a longtime proponent of dry farming at Napa’s Frog’s Leap, concurs: ‘We dry farm because of wine quality, vine health and the tradition of it.’

Where the tension lies

There is, however, the unavoidable truth that you simply can’t grow vines in some places without irrigating the vineyards.

This is where the tension lies. As California winemaker Randall Grahm, founder of Bonny Doon Vineyard, asks: ‘In a world of limited resources, who is to decide which plantations are worthy of preservation?’

History offers a clue. In 1930s France, the creation of the wine appellation system led to severe restrictions on irrigation to control yields and protect quality (the practice was banned for AOC vines in 1964).

Similarly, many of Europe’s prestigious appellations treat irrigation as either forbidden or culturally taboo. Born from an economic and moral crisis, this became a terroir doctrine and today, inadvertently, serves as the perfect blueprint for climate resilience.

With irrigation restrictions now easing across many of Europe’s wine regions, in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, we have to ask: do we adapt our farming to the land, or drain the land to suit our farming?

Sip to make a difference

The Cameron, Dundee Hills Chardonnay, Willamette Valley, Oregon, USA 2023 (94pts, £49.95 AG Wines), made with fruit from drygrown, organically farmed old vines, is clean, crisp and beautifully structured. Discreet oak with fleshy apricots and peaches on the palate, and a mineral finish.

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