From water to wine:
How California vineyards are overcoming climate change
By Kayla Quintero
Tablas Creek Vineyard General Manager Jason Haas refers to years as recent as 2022 as the “poster child” for extreme heat events, when the area was three years into a drought and entering one of the hottest years in Paso Robles’ history. Temperatures as hot as 112 degrees that year killed vines and burned much of the crop. One worker who has helped manage the vineyard for nearly 18 years even said the land looked like a “desert” during these deadly periods of drought.
“It was just too much, just too stressful,” says Haas.
Today, Tablas Creek’s guests are greeted by a reclamation pond accompanied by aquatic plants, expansive areas of the land covered in tall grasses, a rusted and repurposed winery tank holding a soil-strenthening substance called “biochar,” and quite a few furry foragers. At first glance, most would not know that these are just some of the many ways that the winery is coping with climate change.
Château de Beaucastel is a winery located in the southern part of France's Rhône Valley. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
The vineyard was established in San Luis Obispo County’s Paso Robles in 1989 with the intention of transporting drinkers to France’s Château de Beaucastel, known for its Mediterranean climate that allowed their grapes to thrive. Original vine cuttings imported from this region during the establishment of Tablas Creek have made the vineyard renowned for its Rhône-style wines.
But over 30 years later, California winemakers like Tablas Creek have been forced to adapt their farming practices to mitigate global warming. As of mid-February 2025, approximately 59% of the state finds itself in the moderate to exceptional drought categories, including popular wine-producing regions like the Temecula and Santa Ynez valleys.
“It's very clear to me that things have gotten more extreme, that the hot stretches and the droughts are hotter and drier and last longer,” says Haas. “It felt different than it had been before, a little measurably warmer. We've had, now, three different drought cycles in that last 15-year period.”
According to the California Grape Crush Report, the total grape tonnage crushed for winemaking in 2024 was down approximately 24% from the previous year, making it the smallest harvest in the state since 2004. Industry experts say the burning weather is to blame.
California vineyards have had to adapt to different agricultural practices as well as participate in politics pertaining to water in winemaking.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or “SGMA,” has been essential in adapting water-intensive industries like winemaking to this particular resource scarcity in California.
While legislation like this has helped when it comes to the water, the same cannot be said for the wallet.
“Here on the Central Coast, we've got groundwater withdrawals, and they're going to have to start paying up in Paso Robles,” says Michael McCullough, a professor of agribusiness at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
For a state leading the U.S. in wine production, these California winemakers have had to change the way they operate to beat the heat and shift to sustainability. This has included dry-farming, a method of growing crops with limited or no irrigation, dating back to the 1800s as well as artificial intelligence that had just entered estates in the 2010s.
“Dry farming... It's not novel ideas. People do it and been doing it for a long time,” says McCullough.
And being Regenerative Organic Certified through the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which aims to promote holistic agricultural practices, has given vineyards like Tablas Creek a glass-half-full look at how winemaking and the world can work for one another.
“It felt like it was a certification that was built for the moment that we're in,” says Haas. “It's sort of how you both help be a part of the solution to climate change, as well as mitigating some of its worst effects.”
Water pumped out of the Tablas Creek Vineyard reclamation pond is used to wet down compost, which allows it to remain active and properly decompose. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
Sheep provide a natural fertilizer to the Tablas Creek Vineyard and break up compact soil through their grazing. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
Biochar boosts fertility, water retention, and microbial life in the soil at the Tablas Creek Vineyard. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
Cover crops at the Tablas Creek Vineyard enhance soil health by improving its structure, adding organic matter, and increasing microbial activity. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
Dry-Farming Through Drought
To be considered Regenerative Organic Certified, participants are evaluated in three categories – one of which is soil health. The way Tablas Creek Vineyard manages its land greatly contributes to the soil’s retention capabilities that allow vines to grow despite dry conditions. Dry-farming has been a major part of achieving that.
“If you have better soil health, then you can have increased water holding capacity, and so you're a lot more resilient to longer drought periods and those types of things,” says McCullough.
This process works well at the Tablas Creek Vineyard because of its clay and limestone soil compositions that help with moisture retention during dry weather and proper drainage during heavy rainfall.
Biochar is an ancient agricultural tool that is making a comeback at the Tablas Creek Vineyard. Here's how it's made. (Video by Kayla Quintero)
Biochar, a natural form of charcoal produced when organic materials are heated in a low-oxygen environment to create a carbon-rich substance, is applied to soil in addition to manure from the vineyard’s grazing animals. The two contribute to a healthy soil structure, which ultimately means better water retention, drainage, root growth, and microbial activity.
Cover crops like these tall grasses minimize erosion, host beneficial insects, and return nitrogen to the soil. (Photo by Kayla Quintero)
At the surface, practices such as cover cropping with grasses, legumes, and other plants not only reduce water evaporation, but also enhance retention.
The little-to-no irrigation involved in dry-farming encourages the development of deep, extensive root systems. Planting vines spaced further apart from one another allows their roots to access a greater volume of soil, which minimizes competition between them for water and other nutrients while maximizing drought-resilience.
Aside from the benefits that dry-farming provides with regard to water conservation, it also has its perks when it comes to the winemaking process’ final product.
“What you tend to get is very concentrated fruit,” says Tablas Creek Regenerative Specialist Erin Mason. “While you can water the heck out of something all season long, and get a really big crop, what you may have is really watery fruit that doesn’t have a lot of character to it, doesn’t have a lot of developed sugar.”
From the moment the Tablas Creek Vineyard sommelier sets down guests’ tastings, the wines’ fruit-forward aromas fill the air. While these stressed grapevines produce less fruit, those that they do are intensely flavorful.
“There’s a lot of ideas with winemakers and people in wine, that the truest expression of a place is a vine that is dry-farmed,” says Mason.
Water Regulations and Recharge
From soil moisture management to equipment cleaning and sanitization, water plays a crucial role in the various stages of winery operations.
Research published by the Water Footprint Network found that one glass of wine has the global average water footprint, which is the total amount of water required for production, of nearly 32 U.S. gallons. As climate change intensifies in California, so have the issues of drought and water scarcity.
This has not only pushed wineries to change the ways that they run their businesses, but also led to more restrictive legislation that does this with regard to water use.
“So planting a vineyard in a way that we know that it's going to require us to access and use that groundwater every year doesn't seem like a really good plan for the long term health of the business,” says Haas.
Michael Miiller, the director of government relations for the California Association of Winegrape Growers, says that the state’s wineries have committed to groundwater recharge, the process of moving water from the surface downward to replenish underground aquifers. This came in response to Senate Bill 659, an extension of SGMA, that was sponsored by the association and signed into law in 2023.
In San Luis Obispo County, this effort looks like millions of dollars of state funding for sustainability efforts surrounding the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin, a primary source of water that spans 436,000 acres, the equivalent to over 330,000 American football fields. At the Tablas Creek Vineyard, this takes the form of a reclamation pond that holds the H2O responsible for keeping compost moist and ridding the roads of dust.
“Climate change is real, and we've been looking at sustainability issues for a long time relative to climate change, a world which we live in – everything from how we use water to how we move water,” Miiller says.
In 2023, the California Water Supply Solutions Act was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. SB 659 aimed to address the state’s pressing water problem compounded by climate change through the support of a sustainable water supply by way of groundwater recharge.
But this comes at a cost, and the Water Resources Control Board has been forced to raise fees on groundwater recharge permits – raising concerns for those dependent on the water-storing system.
Wine Institute Director of Environmental and Regulatory Affairs Noelle Cremers explained that wineries she oversaw in the Anderson Valley that had been required to pay a $6,000 fee would now need to pay anywhere between $41,000 and $58,000 for that same permit because of the approved increases.
“To get that water and to store it underground, it's not cheap. You're talking about putting some infrastructure in place. You're talking about you're dedicating the resources necessary to move that water and then to put it underground,” says Miiller.
AI in Agriculture
The California wine industry has also turned to AI technology to deal with drought while doing its best to not waste water.
The Monarch Tractor, the world’s first electric autonomous vehicle of its kind, is one example of how Napa County’s Gamble Estates is using artificial intelligence for water management. The Monarch has the ability to move along the countless rows of vines while taking a picture of each of them. Because it is looking at the plant in a spectrum that the human eye cannot, it is able to detect water stress and disease.
“Early detection is key,” says Founder Tom Gamble. “In the long term, if you can sustain that vineyard, the replant before even another decade, that substantially lengthens the time before you have to use water to replant the vineyard.”
Such operations create an overwhelming amount of data, which the farm management app, “WingspanAI,” can easily handle.
Video courtesy of MonarchTractor
“When information starts coming in vine by vine, and there are thousands of vines per acre, then you're going to need some of the analytical tools that AI can provide for whoever's reviewing the data to be as effective as possible, to sustain those vines for as long as possible, and make decisions based on that data,” Gamble says.
While Gamble Estates is just one example of how AI can work in agriculture, other vineyards are using it to automate their irrigation valves. This allows grapegrowers to be alerted when there are leaks or “excessive” water flow rates that need to be shut off.
“AI is not the answer to everything, but it is the tool that is going to help us make smarter decisions about what we're doing and how we need to adjust things,” he says.
But regardless of how it happens, switching to sustainable practices can work for the earth and estates.
“Wine is really this combination of all the good things of humanity”
— Tom Gamble
“We're trying to use data to understand what's really going on so that we can be more precise about it. And whether you do that through dry farming or better monitoring,” says McCullough. “It's all about understanding the plant better and understanding the biome better.”
And more importantly, finding consumers who care about how environmentalism and viticulture can go hand-in-hand could be what those in the industry like Tablas Creek and Gamble Estates need to help itself and our planet.
“You want to find somebody who's passionate about what you are doing and wants to share in the journey,” Gamble says. “Wine is really this combination of all the good things of humanity, from working with nature and interpreting nature, to the social aspects of consuming wine with good friends.”
