How Wine, Truffles and Honey Could Help Europe Fight Wildfires

Flames engulfed a forest in Catalonia, Spain, ripping across a wooded expanse and heading straight for hundred of acres 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 yards 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 Ramón Roqueta, the owner of Celler Abadal, walking across his terraced vineyard on a sunny day this 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 nearly 2.5 million acres scorched. Already, the cumulative area burned so far 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 hookups 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 Center of Catalonia 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 behavior and raise and spread knowledge around good practices. The hope is that consumers will eventually come to recognize 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 Górriz Mifsud, a senior researcher at the Forest Science and Technology Center of Catalonia 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 spokeswoman, said that while the authorized 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.”

Ms. Górriz Mifsud said businesses in southern France, Bulgaria and the Canary Islands had expressed interest in the program.

The innovation is one of many efforts that European authorities are making to counter the growing threat of wildfires. The European Union 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, Ms. Górriz Mifsud said, and the forest science center is in the process of awarding the designation to about 30 other wine producers, with more accreditations in the works.

Mr. 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 flavor of smoke. On a walk through the fields, Mr. 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.

Martín Códax Viticultores, a wine-growing collaborative in Galicia, reached out to the forest science center 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 Tubío, a director at the collaborative.

“We increasingly see vineyards not just as crops,” Mr. Tubío said in an email.

Juan Martínez de Aragón 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,” Mr. Martínez de Aragón explained. “They are like islands scattered throughout what would be the forest.”

Mr. Martínez de Aragón 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.

For food and wine producers high in the Catalan hills, the value of preparing the landscape for the worst is obvious. Mr. Roqueta’s family has been involved in wine making since 1199. The current vineyard is home to cellars that have been used for centuries, a house that has been passed across generations and vines that have been active for decades.

But as he walked across tilled grape rows, past fields that had recently been threatened by drought and fire, Mr. Roqueta said keeping the business going in an era of climate change meant planning ahead.

“We have to adapt for the next eight centuries,” he said.

Carlos Barragán contributed reporting.