Emerging sustainable practices in cool climate viticulture: A case study from Sweden

Abstract

The Swedish wine culture is comparably young, and its domestic wine production is even younger, starting with the official approval by the European Union in 1999. While domestic wine production currently contributes modestly to the Swedish economy, the industry is experiencing notable growth. It attracts investments, gains national and international media attention, and demonstrates a strong determination to thrive. Swedish winemakers have by now shown the ability to produce highly appreciated and award-winning wines from locally grown grapes. Furthermore, recent studies conducted within the context of ongoing global warming indicate the possibility of a future, more extensive wine industry in cold climate regions, such as southern Scandinavia.

In this study, we evaluate the great potential of recent emerging Swedish wine regions, which demonstrate the crucial role of research in achieving industry success. Some pioneering Sweden-oriented viticulture and oenology research has been conducted, some of which is shown in this paper, indicating a possibility to diversify the used grapevine cultivars in the Swedish production. Overall, more research will be needed to advance wine farming in still relatively unknown territories. Given Sweden’s robust sustainability goals and the absence of rigid regional wine regulations, there is both a need and an opportunity for the development of locally adapted, sustainability-driven wine production methods. In this context, unique opportunities exist for practitioners and researchers to explore highly sustainable approaches, such as regenerative viticulture and multifunctional agriculture. These approaches have proven successful in other parts of the world, despite their current limited broader application.