Wine: The canary in the climate-change coal mine

Tuesday, 05 May 2009 12:10

Even slight changes temperature can wreak havoc on high-quality wine, making it particularly vulnerable to global warming.

Bernard Seguin, a climatologist with the French National Agronomy Institute estimates that each one degree increase in temperature in France is equivalent to moving 200 kilometers north.  By the end of the century, with current warming predictions, the north coast of France will be experiencing weather that today is common for the south of France.

English champagne, Swedish white wine

According to the Los Angeles Times a growing number of climatologists are warning that by the turn of the next century, the world´s wine map could change co dramatically that the best sparkling wines would come from Surrey in southern England, not Champagne and Sweden would produce world-class Rieslings.

Bordeaux is on track to have a climate similar to France's southern Languedoc region. Germany, on the other hand, will be producing luscious red wines.

The scientists say man-made greenhouse gases warming the planet are expected to shift viticultural regions toward the poles, cooler coastal zones and higher elevations.

As a matter of fact Belgium, Denmark and Sweden are already producing local wines – something that would have been unthinkable only decades ago.

Pinot noir in Belgium and Holland

Oz Clarke, one of Britain´s best known wine writers writes in his Pocket wine book 2009 that the lower predictions of scientists on global warming 2 degree celcius rise by 2050 would alter wine making in the world dramatically:

“ Burgundy will become as warm as Chateauneuf-du-Pape near Avignon. If you want to produce Burgundy-like flavours, you´ll need to plant Pinot Noir in Holland and Belgium, maybe even on the Baltic coast. Bordeaux´s Cabernets will taste like those of southern France or Spain, and the Merlots of Pomerol and St-Emilion will disappear.”

So far so good

It is true that in Europe it has been a struggle to ripen grapes and therefore global warming has brought wine lovers year after year “vintage of the century” for the past decade.

No question, says London-based wine critic Jancis Robinson, global warming is changing wines. "Dry German wines now are seriously delicious. English wines and Canadian wines have benefited."

 "With wine, we can taste climate change," says Gregory V. Jones, a climatologist at Southern Oregon University who is a leading researcher in the burgeoning field of wine-region climate studies and the son of an Oregon vintner. "You can honestly argue that Bordeaux is better off today. They can now consistently ripen their grapes."

 California´s largest wine region: too hot

Reseach suggests that although the current weather is considered optimal in wine regions such as California, they might be at the edge of what is ideal. Slight climate changes could be enough to push them over that edge. “ Napa Valley will only be able to produce the baked jug wines that today spew out of California´s Central Valley,” writes wine specialist Oz Clarke.”And the Central Valley, California´s largest wine region, would simply be to hot to produce a usable crop.“

In France rising temperatures have produced wines with higher sugars and alcohol levels and lower acids that are very popular. "Our weather now is perfect," says Jean-Guillaume Prats, the renowned chief executive of Chateau Cos d'Estournel, a second-growth Bordeaux house in St. Estephe. "Global warming has changed the style of wine we make to be a rounder, a more forward wine."

Losers in Europe: Spain, Portugal, southern Italy and southern France

So far so good, but with the predicted temperatures rise, the losers will likely be at the warm end of the viticulture scale—vineyards in Spain, Portugal, southern France, southern Italy, and California´s Napa Valley.

Temperatures in Spain and Portugal could increase more than 5 degrees, which would make all but the high-altitude viticulture extremely difficult.

Those projections have set off alarms in Spain, says Pancho Campo, president of the Wine Academy of Spain. He organized the first World Conference on Global Warming and Wine in March in Barcelona, attended by more than 100 scientists, journalists, and winemakers in 2006. It will be held for the third time in 2010. "We had to drag the growers and vintners in to addressing global warming,” Mr. Campo says. The increasing participation is a sign of the time. The wine industry is taking climate change seriously. Very seriously indeed.

(Sources: Oz Clarke: The Pocket wine book 2009, the Los Angeles Times, the Environmental economics website (http://www.env-econ.net/2006/09/the_wine_of_cli.html), Climate change and wine home page (www.climatechangeandwine.com))