The year I wrote a book and changed my life
My new book on wine and sustainability is out today. But writing it taught me about a lot besides climate change. Plus: what I've been drinking this week... with The Bunch
To my slight alarm, the wine influencer who had just introduced herself turned to a lady behind her and gushed, “Hermione, this is my friend Andy!” It was a party for Greek Wine Month, late May; I had a glass in my hand, a babble of voices around me. Hermione Ireland, it transpired, was Managing Director of the UK’s foremost wine publisher, the Academie du Vin Library: “I’m looking for a journalist to write me a book on wine and climate change.” “That’s me!” I yelped.
If you’d told me then that 16 months later I would be launching that very book, my first, having quit my day job, travelled around the world and written 65,000 words with a new friend and co-author, I’d have been in danger of spitting out my wine. But here we are: today Hermione publishes Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, by me and Jane Masters MW. It picks apart wine’s impact on the environment from grape to glass: not only how the grapes are grown and how climate change is affecting them, not just what happens in the winery, but the bottles’ packaging and their journey to our tables, as well as wine’s social impact on those who work in it – all told through the people making, shipping and selling wine.
In May 2024, that was still in the future. Soon after the party, Hermione met Jane, then asked how we’d both feel about a co-writer. That made sense to me: I’d just started trying to extricate myself from a soul-destroying public-sector communications job and was unsure when I’d finally escape. Next, Jane and I hit it off over tapas and Spanish wine. Early last autumn we started planning structure and research, and I savagely edited some bits of a book that she’d begun writing and shelved a couple of years earlier.
We come from very different professional backgrounds – and that worked brilliantly. I’m a historian by training and a journalist by trade: I had more than a decade on Fleet Street and I’ve been writing about wine now for 20 years. My vision for the book was that the stories and the people had to carry it, not the science and the stats. Jane isn’t a writer, but has getting on for 40 years in the wine trade as a buyer, consultant winemaker and more. She’s a scientist by training, with a far greater technical knowledge of winemaking than me, and of climate change too.
However, we’re both in love with wine. And we’re committed environmentalists: we were both moved to write by the string of extreme-weather disasters that have hit wine regions worldwide in recent years: decade-long drought in Chile and desperate heat and drought in Catalonia and South Africa; fires in California, Oregon and Australia; catastrophic frost and hail in Chablis and Cahors; and then the horror of the Valencia floods a year ago this month, sweeping away vineyards and killing more than 230 people. We can taste wines changing in the climate emergency, too – Burgundies that don’t taste very Burgundian any more – even if England’s vineyards are sort-of winners.
At the end of November last year, I finally baled out of the corporate world and was free. After a month of furious writing, research and editing, on New Year’s Eve I departed for Mexico, where I stayed with a friend for 10 days before heading on to California and the start of field research. As a newspaper executive it was always one of my maxims that every time you get away from your desk, get out and talk to people, you discover something new – even if it wasn’t necessarily what you were looking for. I remembered that afresh in the vineyards of Paso Robles, California. It was the start of three and a half months on the road – Sonoma and Napa, back home and then to Italy, the Paris wine fair, Portugal, South Africa, Chile, Argentina and Greece. Regular readers will have followed some of those travels in this blog: I wrote earlier this year about the highs and lows of life on the road as a wine journalist.
Some of the things I discovered were new because they were completely outside my previous professional experience. Wine journalists and critics write almost exclusively about what wines are like, the vineyards they come from and how they were made. The rest of those wines’ journey is “packaging solutions” and palletisation: a business world that I suspect bores many wine writers. Yet, for instance, around 40 per cent of a bottle of wine’s carbon footprint is just the glass bottle. Jane and I were determined to tell that story too.
So we visited bottle factories, bottling plants, cork factories and a recycling plant – and their scale was gasp-inducing. Watching fiery gobs of molten glass chopped and shaped by towering machines at Ardagh Group’s bottle factory in Barnsley; standing next to a feeder pushing recycled glass chips into a furnace as big as a house at Encirc, Cheshire; walking along a bottling line the size of several football fields at Greencroft, Durham as hundreds of bottles streamed past, filled by robots: this is not what wine writers usually do. But it was thrilling – both the scale and ingenuity of the operations, and the feeling of learning so much, so fast.
Some things that I discovered, I already knew intellectually but were given new force by seeing them in real life. Winemakers in Greece, Chile and Portugal told me the same story of young people not wanting to work the land these days and leaving for the cities, creating chronic rural labour shortages. Winery owners in California, Argentina and England showed me how important wine tourism has become to their businesses – and how it can help create a different kind of rural economy, offering local people new career paths.
And while I’ve read and written plenty about climate change, seeing its effects on the ground brought home one of the book’s central messages: that wine is the canary in the coal mine for the climate emergency. The wine industry is built upon the health of this one, sensitive Mediterranean creeper, Vitis vinifera, the common grape vine. I saw vines dead from heatwaves in Greece; vines imbibing drip irrigation in Chile in a climate where average rainfall has plummeted over the past two decades; vines shredded by freak hailstorms in Argentina. They should be our wake-up call.
I discovered new things about people too, especially while investigating social sustainability. Before visiting South Africa in February, I’d only once been to sub-Saharan Africa and that was with Tony Blair in Nigeria, when I was his speechwriter – hardly a representative view of the continent. But in Stellenbosch one winery took me to the “informal settlement” (ie entirely black shanty town) where their workers lived. They took me to the crèche they funded and past a school and a soup kitchen which they’d given money. Positive actions by an ethical company – yet the barbed wire on the gate of the crèche, the dilapidated shacks and the groups of listless, ragged unemployed men told their own story. I was deeply shocked. As we drove back up the hill to the winery for a tasting, I felt in a daze.
Yet I met truly impressive people in South Africa trying to right apartheid’s horrible legacy. Sophia Warner was a London special needs teacher until she came to South Africa in 2003 and founded the Pebbles educational charity. It now helps operate centres serving 1,400 children: I visited a couple of their schools. Pebbles also offers health checks for pregnant mothers; a first-1,000-days programme for young children; mobile libraries; clinics, and more. Through their dedicated work, Warner and others like her somehow manage to keep hope alive despite the enormity of their country’s entrenched, racialised poverty.
In a sense, that’s not a bad metaphor for the battle against climate change. Most of the news about climate change is bad and scary. We see President Trump blurting his inanities about it all being a con. And the kinds of shifts involved in tackling the climate emergency are vast, complex and beyond the ability of the wine industry – let alone one winery or one person – to do much about.
Yet writing this book I met so many wine people doing their bit to make change, one step at a time: creating hope. Noelia Callejo told me how she installed solar panels on the roof of the family’s winery in Ribera del Duero, Spain, which now generate all their power needs. Johan Reyneke showed me how he’s rewilding wildlife corridors in his Stellenbosch vineyards: already the animals are coming back. In Luján de Cuyo, Argentina, Maricruz Antolin of Krontiras explained her search for a biodynamic solution to her vineyard’s problem of leafcutter ants. David Gleave, Chairman of big UK importer Liberty, told me how they’d saved both emissions and money when they switched many of their European imports from road to rail. These people doing these things isn’t going to save the world. But it’s a start, on their own patch. Which, since my patch is journalism, is what I’ve done with this book.
It’s crucially important to believe in the possibility of change – hence the book’s title. And in this respect, another big thing I learnt writing it is that you can change your life. I’ve always been a believer in self re-invention, having changed careers several times. It renews your sense of purpose and keeps you learning; it’s energising to make your own luck. But I hadn’t done it for a while and was feeling stuck. Now, after this year and this book, my world feels different again.
Also: for sure, we’re in tight spot – but we have wine to help see us through. It remains one of humanity’s most sublime inventions. One Spanish producer asked me, “Do people want to be taking the weight of the world’s problems on their shoulders when they open a bottle of wine?” No – and we’re not asking drinkers to do that. Wine exists to be enjoyed. But if we want to safeguard our future, we need first of all to understand how this wine, and everything else, got to our tables. I hope this book helps us do that.
My book with Jane Masters MW, Rooted in Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine, is published today by the Academie du Vin Library. For a special reader discount of 10 per cent off, order via the link and quote the code CHANGE10. Valid until 31 October 2025.
Dream team: sharing a glass with my co-author, Jane Masters MW (photo: Adam Shaw); and the moment I saw the finished book for the first time
What I’ve been drinking this week… with The Bunch
Last week I went to the annual tasting of The Bunch, a collective of six independent wine merchants who hold this joint event every year. Corney & Barrow, Haynes, Hanson & Clark, Lea & Sandeman, Private Cellar, Tanners and Yapp Brothers all import as well as sell wine, truffling out a wide range of interesting independent producers. And it’s always a notably friendly and relaxed tasting. This year’s selection was particularly strong: these were some of my favourites.
Arnaud Aucoeur “Vieilles Vignes 2023, Beaujolais-Villages – if you thought all Beaujolais was red, you’d be wrong, though just four per cent of its wines are white, mostly Chardonnay. They’re hard to find in the UK – or in France, for that matter. This one brims with bright, rich fruit though it’s still pleasingly fresh, and unoaked (Yapp Bros, £16.75.)
Domaine des Hauts Châssis “Esquisse” 2023, Crozes-Hermitage – classic northern Rhône Syrah from a semi-biodynamic producer: fresh, pure bramble fruit with perfect weight and balance. Just about as good as red Crozes gets (Corney & Barrow, £22.50.)
Weingut Braunewell Pinot Noir 2020, Rheinhessen – this German Spätburgunder (ie Pinot Noir, which this one is labelled as) is a nice example of the style: aromatic, fresh, red fruit and spicy, savoury notes. Good value for what it is (Lea & Sandeman, £18.95 or £16.95 as part of case of any 12 wines.)
Weingut Mehofer Pinot Noir Neudegg 2022, Wagram – another Pinot Noir but from an organic Austrian producer: very fragrant yet also with more weight than the Pinot above; pure, fragrant black cherry fruit – lovely (Private Cellar, £20.85.)
Château Lancyre “Clos des Combes” 2023, Pic Saint Loup – a 50/50 blend of Grenache and Syrah, this is a classic Languedoc red: dark, peppery fruit with grip and freshness too (Haynes, Hanson & Clark, £16.35.)
Senderos de Ukan 2021, Rioja – this small producer just outside La Guardia, Rioja Alavesa, sources grapes from old-vine plots. Beautiful, rich fruit, judicious use of oak and a lot of finesse (Tanners, £25.)
Transparency declaration: I visited all the estates and businesses mentioned above as their guest. The Bunch was a trade/press tasting.
Congratulations, Andy, look forward to reading your book!
Hopeful, despite all the global problems