Irregular summer rainfall and persistent pests have sharply reduced grape production on Santa Maria, but winemaker João Letras says the island’s wines will preserve the quality consumers have come to expect

A vineyard is an agreement made with the future. The grower prunes in winter, tends the vines through spring, and watches the fruit emerge with the expectation that, months later, the year’s labor will arrive safely at the harvest. But agriculture has always contained another party to that agreement—one that signs nothing and promises nothing. The weather can change. Birds can descend. Disease and pests can take what months of human labor have carefully prepared. On Santa Maria, the 2026 grape harvest is a particularly difficult reminder of that vulnerability: production is expected to be about 40 percent lower, largely because of irregular summer rainfall and pest damage.

The traditional grape harvest began toward the end of July and continued through August, but growers soon realized that this would not be an ordinary year.

“This year we have less production—40 percent less,” explains João Letras, recently named Winemaker of the Year and associated with the Cooperativa Mariense.

For an island whose summers have traditionally been described as comparatively dry, the problem has been an unusual one: too much rain arriving at the wrong time.

A Summer That No Longer Behaves as Expected

Letras points to “irregular precipitation in July and August” as one of the principal causes of the decline, alongside the continuing pressure of pests.

The distinction between the two problems is important because farmers possess very different degrees of control over them. Pest damage can potentially be reduced through coordinated intervention. Rainfall cannot.

“As far as precipitation is concerned, nothing can be done,” Letras acknowledges. But regarding pests, he says, a working group bringing together several partners across the Autonomous Region is studying possible measures and proposals for combating the problem.

The challenge extends beyond Santa Maria. According to Letras, producers throughout the Azores have been facing damage from a range of animals, including pigeons, doves, Madeira lizards, blackbirds, and occasionally rats, all of which can reach vineyards before the grapes reach the winery.

For the farmer, the percentages eventually become something much more personal.

“A farmer is always sadder and more disappointed when he works the entire year and then sees the pests at work,” Letras says. Irregular rainfall deepens that frustration precisely because there is so little the producer can do against it.

It is one of agriculture’s oldest cruelties: the work belongs to the farmer, but the final decision does not always belong to the farmer.

Climate Change Enters the Vineyard

Behind the immediate difficulties of 2026 lies a larger concern about changing climatic patterns.

Letras has lived on Santa Maria for slightly more than three years, but says residents have repeatedly described the island’s summers to him as traditionally very dry. This year has been strikingly different.

“We are having enormous amounts of rain throughout the summer,” he explains, adding that such conditions inevitably affect production.

One season alone cannot define the long-term climatic future of an island, and individual harvests have always varied with weather. Yet for agriculture, climate change is experienced not only through dramatic events or long-term temperature averages. It is also encountered through disrupted expectations: rain arriving when dryness was anticipated, growing seasons becoming less predictable, and traditional agricultural calendars losing some of the reliability accumulated through generations of experience.

For grape growers, timing is particularly unforgiving. Rainfall that might benefit one crop at one stage of development can become damaging to another approaching harvest.

The vineyard is therefore becoming one of the places where global environmental change acquires a distinctly local language.

Less Wine, but Not Lesser Wine

There is, however, an important distinction between quantity and quality.

Despite the substantial decline in grapes available for winemaking, Letras says consumers should not interpret the 40 percent reduction as evidence that the quality of Santa Maria’s wines will diminish.

There will simply be less of them.

He assures consumers that, even with reduced quantities of the cooperative’s labels—including wines associated with the 2025 campaign—they can continue to expect the established level of quality.

That distinction is particularly important for smaller island wine regions. When production is inherently limited by geography, losing nearly half of a harvest cannot easily be compensated for by expanding vineyards elsewhere or obtaining grapes from an unlimited surrounding territory. Scarcity becomes immediately consequential.

Yet maintaining quality despite scarcity also says something about the maturation of Azorean winemaking. The objective cannot simply be to produce more bottles, but to protect the character and reputation of what reaches the market.

The Fragility Behind Every Bottle

The difficulties on Santa Maria also reveal how much invisible labor stands behind something as seemingly simple as a bottle of wine.

The consumer sees the label, the color in the glass and perhaps the name of an island. The grower remembers everything that came before: pruning, tending, watching the weather, protecting the vines, waiting for maturation and hoping that birds, disease, rodents and unexpected rain will leave enough fruit to harvest.

A 40 percent decline is therefore more than an agricultural statistic. It represents grapes that never reached the press, wine that will never enter a barrel and income that producers expected but may never receive.

It also raises an increasingly important question for Azorean agriculture: how can traditional crops be protected in an era when some of the environmental assumptions upon which they developed are becoming less dependable?

Pest-management strategies can be improved. Research can identify new forms of protection. Regional cooperation can help growers respond collectively. But no public policy can order the clouds away from Santa Maria.

That is why adaptation will increasingly become part of the agricultural vocabulary of the islands.

For now, the 2026 harvest continues with fewer grapes but with the determination to preserve the quality of what remains. And somewhere in that contradiction lies the ancient dignity of farming: knowing that nature has taken part of the harvest and still returning to the vineyard to gather what it has left behind.

Wine has always been a conversation between human patience and the earth. This year in Santa Maria, the rain interrupted that conversation, and the pests took their share. The bottles will be fewer. But what remains will hold something no percentage can fully measure—the story of a difficult summer, the persistence of those who cultivated through it, and an island determined to turn what survived the vineyard into wine.

Based on a story in Correio dos Açores-Natalino Viveiros, director. Photo from CA.