Coffee, Cheese, Wine: Nature’s Most Essential Foods? Or just my most essential foods?:
Coffee growers are dealing with a lot right now.
Most immediately, the Trump administration’s tariffs, which threaten their sales, add to the ongoing challenges of pests and diseases for coffee production. In the longer term, experts say the coffee industry can’t continue with business as usual. Growers face a waning labor force, and the areas where coffee can reliably grow are poised to shrink dramatically.
While your morning cup isn’t going away anytime soon, it could become more expensive — and could taste different, too.
Due to the effects of climate change, the land suitable for coffee farming could shrink by 50% by 2050, according to a 2014 study. The analysis found that “highly productive areas” in the two largest coffee-producing countries in the world, Brazil and Vietnam, “may become unsuitable for coffee in the future.”
Much of the coffee in the U.S. comes from Brazil. If you’re fond of specialty coffee, it could have come from Colombia, Central America, or Ethiopia. Ethiopia, for example, could see a 21% loss of coffee-growing area with warming temperatures, according to researchers.
“Climate change, climate change, climate change,” is the top problem facing coffee-producing regions, says Sara Morrocchi, the founder and CEO of Vuna, a company that does coffee consulting and education.
Jeremy Haggar, a professor of agroecology at the University of Greenwich who has spent decades researching coffee in Central America, says temperature isn’t the only concern related to climate change — drought is a big one.
“Coffee is, I would say, quite a resilient crop,” he says. “It does grow under quite a range of climatic conditions, but obviously there are limits to that.” He says one year in Nicaragua the dry season was extra long and he saw “the whole system start to collapse.” The coffee plants were defoliating, and trees planted to give shade and shield the coffee from the heat of the sun started to die as well.
In many countries, coffee farmers often live at or below the poverty line. And on top of that, the price of coffee set on the international market is variable and doesn’t take into account the cost of production. Farmers need to plan far ahead, as coffee plants can take a few years to bear fruit, which is hard to do when you don’t know what the price of coffee will be in a few years, Haggar says.
Financial pressures, migration and harsh working conditions are also leading to shortages of farmworkers.
Farmers are getting older and younger generations don’t want to carry on the business when they see their parents struggling to get by, Morrocchi says.
There you have it. Climate change, horrible working conditions, poverty-level incomes. If ever a country deserves to suffer from these conditions, the country whose government forbids the use of the term ‘climate change’ is at the front of the line.
Cheese: Meet the World’s Greatest Cheesemonger. Based in Philly. To put it mildly, it’s not easy to become the World’s Greatest Cheesemonger:
On Sept. 15, that dedication made her a world champion. In a competition that tested every skill a cheesemonger can wield, D’Albero, 31, sliced her way past the globe’s best to be crowned “Meilleure Fromagère du Monde.” That’s French for “Best Cheesemonger in the World.”
So the event planner became an apprentice and started a career defined by the daily work of selling cheese, butter and dairy products. But to D’Albero — who counts Parmigiano as her favorite cheese and mountain cheeses as her favorite style — it’s never been just about sales.
“It goes a lot farther than that,” she said. “We’re also storytellers of the cheese. We are stewards of the products. We are the middleman between the maker and the consumer. And we have to represent these makers and tell their stories, always in service to the cheese.”
By 2018 — a year after she started working with cheese — she entered her first Cheesemonger Invitational in Brooklyn. Over the next six years, she climbed rung after rung on her way to France: the Cheesemonger Invitational again, then the master’s round. Winning the master’s in March secured her one of two spots on Team USA for the Mondial du Fromage.
That’s how D’Albero arrived in Tours this fall, standing under fluorescent lights in a convention center filled with wheels, wedges and some of the sharpestcheeses in Europe. The Mondial du Fromage is the cheesemongers’ Olympics — an eight-hour obstacle course where stamina matters as much as skill.
The first challenge was a written exam that could humble a doctoral candidate, she said. “It was the hardest possible questions they could think of,” D’Albero recalled — everything from the precise date an Alpine cheese can be made to identifying a random goat by photo and listing what cheeses its milk could produce.
Then came blind tasting: four mystery cheeses,10 minutes, and a list of details to guess — milk type, pasteurization, age, style, country of origin, even the exact name. After that, the cheesemongers vied to produce the “perfect cut.” Competitors had five minutes to slice four immaculate half-pound portions of cheese and wrap them up — all without a scale.
And then there was the most personal event: the oral presentation. Each monger had five minutes to make the judges fall in love with a cheese.
True to her taste and Italian American background, D’Albero chose Parmigiano Reggiano — “the cheese that taught me that cheese can be an experience, rather than just an ingredient,” D’Albero told the judges during her presentation. She picked a wheel chosen and aged by her friend Giorgio Cravero, a fifth-generation cheese ager, and described how its signature “soft and sweet” flavor profile made every bite gentler than the salty parmesans most people know. She linked the flavor to her friend’s kindness and the way his family had once welcomed her as one of their own.
Some of you may know that, in my post-career gig at Trader Joe’s, I created the character of Monsieur du Fromage, wearing a beret and a scratchy goatee while handing out cheese samples and speaking in pidgin French. A tip of the beret from my alter ego to Emilia D’Albero, the world’s Meilleure Fromagère du Monde.
According to a study published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in 2024, up to 70% of current wine-producing regions could become unsuitable for growing grapes if global temperatures rise by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. A more concerning statistic is that around 90% of traditional wine regions in coastal and lowland areas of Spain, Italy, Greece, and southern California could be at risk of disappearing by the end of the century due to drought and heatwaves.
Global warming has been our greatest challenge as winegrowers for years. Vines are acutely sensitive to the climate shifts and have acted, for many years, as the “canary in the coal mine,” sounding the alarm as rising temperatures, erratic weather, and water scarcity threaten the very foundation of our craft. We have already witnessed the significant risks that climate change poses. Yet, despite these early warning signs, the Spanish wine sector as a whole was slow to react, only recently embracing decisive adaptation and mitigation measures.
Penedès is the first wine-producing area where all wines are made entirely from organic grapes. This is an important first step, but we should not settle for this alone. Regenerative viticulture is resonating as the agricultural model most suited for the current climate, a model that actively improves soil health and ecosystem resilience. By avoiding tillage, maintaining ground cover, and fostering biodiversity, our vineyards have become healthy, fertile, and resilient ecosystems that also capture atmospheric CO₂.
High temperatures accelerate the start of the grape harvest, causing an unbalanced ripening which could ultimately affect the quality of the wine. As a result, vineyards are being planted in higher grounds and grape varieties are being replaced by others better adapted to higher temperatures and drought. Irrigation systems will become necessary to support yields and ensure the quality of the grapes.
Many wineries have decided to switch to lighter wine bottles to reduce CO2 emissions and the use of renewable energy is finally becoming commonplace. In Spain, green energy has made significant progress, with 56% of electricity generated from renewable sources in 2024, according to Spain’s Red Eléctrica. Other initiatives include promoting circular economy and Carbon Capture & Reuse technologies—for example capturing the CO2 from the fermentation of wine and reuse it in the winery as a gas inert—and using trains instead of trucks for shipping goods across Europe.
Besides reducing our carbon footprint, we must find ways to absorb the greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere, causing global warming. Planting trees is considered the most effective way to absorb greenhouse gases, as each tree absorbs approximately 5 kg of carbon annually as it grows. In our case, we have planted more than 100 hectares of trees in Chile in recent years and manage almost 2.000 hectares of forests in Spain—nearly double our vineyard holdings. Well-managed forests also play a role in promoting biodiversity and reducing the risk of wildfires.
There’s more. But wineries throughout the globe are on the cutting edge of sustainability. One more excuse for me to raise a glass–or three.
Emmylou Harris sings us out:
