FLAMES engulfed a forest in Catalonia, Spain, ripping across a wooded expanse and heading straight for hundreds of hectares of pines and underbrush.
But before it reached them, the inferno encountered Celler Abadal, an 800-year-old family vineyard that sprawls across the red-clay hills.
As the fire approached the tidy rows of grapes, separated from the tree line by only a few metres of barren soil, a strange thing happened.
The blaze stopped.
It was an example, in 2017, of an unexpected piece of good news.
Certain landscapes, including vineyards, can help to slow or even partly stop runaway forest fires.
“It’s not only that it is beautiful,” said Ramon Roqueta, the owner of Celler Abadal, walking across his terraced vineyard on a sunny day last month, pointing out a largely treeless hill where flames once raged. “It’s also making the area more resilient.”
Wildfires in Europe are growing more intense and catastrophic over time.
Last year, the continent experienced its worst wildfire season since records began in 2006, with more than a million hectares scorched. Already, the cumulative area burned in 2026 is outpacing the yearly average from 2006 to 2025.
As fires worsen, European nations are adapting, focusing less on purely responding and more on preparing.
One novel idea that fire researchers are promoting is that winemakers – along with truffle farms and apiaries – have a critical role to play in making dry, arid places more resilient to climate change and extreme blazes.
In the case of vineyards, lush green vines are tough to burn. The clean space between rows means that fire has to jump to continue. And grapes thrive where other crops would not.
Vineyards sometimes place water hook-ups and access routes, which are useful to firefighters, high in the mountains, where such infrastructure might otherwise not exist.
Likewise, truffle and honey cultivation spurs farmers to manage forest patches that would otherwise grow wild.
Given that, over the past year, experts working with the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (FSTCC) have begun to award a “Fire Wine” and “Fire Product” designation to vineyards and other farms that adopt practices that could help to avoid future disasters.
Last year, Celler Abadal became the first winemaker to receive the “Fire Wine” label.
The badge, not unlike the organic designation featured on many European labels, is meant to both reward good behaviour and raise and spread knowledge around good practices.
The hope is that consumers will eventually come to recognise it, making it a marketing tool that rewards responsible growers.
“Those who become included in the label, they’re more aware of what they’re doing well, what they could be doing better,” said Elena Gorriz Mifsud, a senior researcher at FSTCC who helped start the project. The European Union provided initial funding, she said.
“We are not only producing wine,” she explained. “We are producing security.”
Katerina Horakova, a European Union spokesman, said that while the authorised certification is only in Catalonia for now, the framework is adaptable, and “there is a possibility that the model could be extended to other fire-prone regions”.
Gorriz Mifsud said businesses in southern France, Bulgaria and the Canary Islands had expressed interest in the programme.
The innovation is one of many efforts that European authorities are making to counter the growing threat of wildfires.
The EU has developed extensive mapping and monitoring technologies, which it is improving with more data and frequent updates.
The bloc and national capitals also work together to position firefighters in places of high risk and expand fleets of firefighting aircraft.
But preventive measures, like landscape management, play a major and growing role.
In Spain, six vineyards in Catalonia and two in Galicia have been given the “Fire Wine” label, Gorriz Mifsud said, and FSTCC is in the process of awarding the designation to about 30 other wine producers, with more accreditations in the works.
Roqueta’s vineyard won the distinction in part because of the measures it took after the 2017 fire, he said.
Although the flames did not wipe out the vineyard, the blaze scorched plots and left other grapes tainted with the flavour of smoke.
On a walk through the fields, Roqueta pointed out the donkeys munching grass in the nearby forest. They help to thin out growth in the forest on the outskirts of the vineyard.
The vineyard has also removed grass from areas near the tree line, leaving less ground cover for fires to burn.
Martin Codax Viticultores, a wine-growing collaborative in Galicia, reached out to FSTCC after fires raged in the region for two weeks last year.
The “Fire Wine” team suggested that the vineyards maintain buffer zones between the vines and the forest, cut back vegetation during fire season and improve access to water for firefighting teams, said Miguel Tubio, a director at the collaborative.
“We increasingly see vineyards not just as crops,” Tubio said in an email.
Juan Martinez de Aragon said the same of his black truffles.
He manages Biotruf, which grows the pungent delicacies in the hills of Catalonia. Like vineyards, truffle plantations can help stop flames spreading.
Truffles are planted at the base of holm oak trees. The rows of trees are spaced far apart and at a distance from the surrounding forest, and they have water lines running between them.
The surrounding ground cover is sparse because of how the truffles grow.
“It’s something that happens naturally: the elimination of vegetation from the ground because the fungus around the tree acts as a natural herbicide,” Martinez de Aragon explained. “They are like islands scattered throughout what would be the forest.”
Martinez de Aragon takes tourists truffle digging as part of his business, showing them how to wash and prepare the fungi.
In the truffle tasting room, he displays the packaging he uses for his fungi, stamped with the “Fire Product” label.
“The public needs to know that besides truffles being very delicious and widely consumed, we are doing very important work,” he said. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Already a subscriber? Log in
Get 20% OFF The Star Digital Access
Cancel anytime. Ad-free. Unlimited access with perks.
