(Wine Searcher) - It was confirmed last week that anti-hail nets are to be approved for use in French vineyards.

It's that time of year again in Europe: the grapes are turning colour and weeks are being counted until harvest. But one threat remains, something that increasingly keeps winemakers awake at night: hail, a natural catastrophe that can eliminate the crop in a matter of minutes.

As I well know from my short stint as acting editor of Wine-Searcher in 2014, news writers vie with each other to describe the latest hail disaster in the vineyards – were those hail stones as big as peas, golf balls or pigeon eggs (yes, that was a French report)? Exactly what percentage of the vineyard was devastated? What about insurance? Will local government step in to help growers with financial compensation?

According to Jancis Robinson's Oxford Companion to Wine, hail costs French agriculture more than half a billion euros a year. And there is much evidence that the unpredictability of climate change is making the situation worse with some vineyards hit more than once in a year, and in consecutive years too. Yet in hail-prone Mendoza in Argentina, valuable vineyards are routinely netted.