Photo/Illutration The first shipment of the 2025 Beaujolais Nouveau wine arrives at Haneda Airport in Tokyo on Oct. 22. (Sayuri Ide)

In the crisp clarity of the morning air, I feel autumn ripening and deepening.

The season of harvest scents and quiet abundance awakens the appetite with its earthy offerings—mushrooms, chestnuts and persimmons. For wine lovers, it’s a season of eager anticipation for the arrival of young reds.

Beaujolais Nouveau, France’s fresh and festive pour, must wait for its official, legally mandated release: the third Thursday of November, set for Nov. 20 this year.

Meanwhile, Vino Novello, Italy’s counterpart to the youthful French red, made its debut at the end of last month.

The rich aroma and light taste of the new wine come from a distinctive fermentation method. Whole grape clusters left uncrushed are placed in tanks filled with carbon dioxide, where they ferment rapidly to create delicate, fragrant wines best enjoyed soon after harvest.

In Italian tradition, the perfect pairing is chestnuts. Roasted chestnuts and new wine form an essential duo at autumn festivals, now in full swing.

Beyond new wine, most of the world’s renowned wine-producing regions—such as Italy and southern France—lie in the middle latitudes. These areas, well suited for grape cultivation, are often called the “wine belt.”

The ideal conditions for growing quality wine grapes are a moderately warm, low-humidity climate without excessively hot summers.

Yet, the spreading and increasingly pronounced effects of climate change in recent years have begun to take a serious toll on wine production in these zones.

According to a paper published last year by researchers at the University of Bordeaux and others, harvest seasons in most of the world’s wine regions have advanced by two to three weeks over the past 40 years.

When I once spoke with a grape grower in Australia, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s leading wine regions, he expressed deep concern, saying that heat waves were “cooking the grapes right on the vine.”

In Europe, global warming is fueling a wine-making boom in more northerly areas such as Britain, while in Spain, rising temperatures are forcing vineyards to move to higher altitudes in search of cooler climates.

As I recently uncorked a bottle of this year’s new wine, I couldn’t help but reflect on the warming that may soon redraw the “wine map.” The aroma that lingered on my palate felt like a subtle, deeply textured warning from the grapes themselves.

—The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 7

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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