Preparing for an El Niño Harvest

I have had a good chuckle over the past few days while scrolling through my Instagram feed and seeing American and European winemakers posting stressed-out updates, scrambling because their harvest is kicking off in July. The heat has been relentless, there has been very little rain, the sugars are climbing, and everyone seems completely caught off guard by how early the season has turned.

Watching from the Southern Hemisphere, it is hard not to notice the irony. Down here, we

went through this exact same scramble earlier this year.

For me, the 2026 harvest caught me with my pants down, still floating from an amazing Christmas and New Year spent with my family. My first walk through the vineyards I didn’t even take a refractometer. Where I usually see around 70% of clusters going through veraison, I found the Pinotage just a few days away from being ready to pick for Free the Bubble. (In fairness, this is a dryland vineyard after an incredibly dry season, but still—the shock was real).

I was so far from ready, I hadn’t even ordered cleaning products for the cellar yet. After a mad scramble, we kicked off, and it was relentless. We harvested every day; yields were up, yet sugars were rising faster than normal.

There are three types of ripeness when picking grapes:

• Phenological ripeness: when the flavour and tannin compounds in the grape are well-developed and will have the best impact on the wine.

• Physiological ripeness: when the sugar and acid levels will create a balanced wine

• Psychological ripeness: the moment where logistics, sleep deprivation, and an open tank perfectly align to actually bring the fruit in.

  
  

The reality is that the old farming calendars—the experiential knowledge of exactly when to start sampling and have the cellar ready—no longer apply. Climate change is shifting the goalposts every single vintage, and if you are relying on historical dates to tell you when to pick, you will find yourself just as I did.

The principle of walking the vineyards constantly and adapting on our feet is no longer a bonus; it’s a necessity. For those of us working naturally, the stakes are even higher. I can’t rely on a chemical toolkit to “fix” an overripe, flabby wine in the cellar. If the grapes come in wrong, the wine is wrong.

After my experience this year, it is easy to think that the solution lies in simply increasing processing capacity in the cellar. Sure, that helps me with psychological ripeness, but it does absolutely nothing for phenological ripeness. To fix that, we need to slow down ripening and to do that, we must look to the soil.

Without rattling on again about the wonders of regenerative agriculture and building up organic matter in the soil, the reality is that this is our best and only defence. We are entering an El Niño season, which will likely domino into another multi-year drought cycle. We have had our seven fat years (in the Western Cape at least), and if farmers haven't used this time to build up soil carbon content, they are in for a rough ride.

in the process of building soil health, what we are actually doing is relentlessly driving up the organic carbon content in the earth. Carbon is the ultimate buffer system. It physically changes the architecture of the soil, working as a subterranean sponge. When the extreme heat hits, it is this carbon-rich, living soil that locks in moisture and keeps the root systems insulated and cool. 

Because the vines are far less stressed by the extremes, they don't panic. They don't spike their sugars prematurely while the flavour and tannin compounds are still green and underdeveloped. Regen practices give the vineyard the resilience to weather the extremes.

The single best thing farmers can do now to brace for the coming season is to mulch heavily. It is an expensive operation but if you don’t have 3% soil carbon now, this is the best way to protect the soil and keep it cool. Straw is the best option and as it breaks down, it will add carbon to the soil. 

You can't control when the season shifts, but you can be ready for it.