What rising temperatures may mean for world’s wine industry(2)
“Climate change will affect Europe more than other places,” Torres says. “The map of the European appellations will have a dramatic change. If there is a change of 2 or 3 more degrees, where do you place a Burgundy, or a Rioja? What are you going to do? In places like Chile or Argentina, in the Southern hemisphere, you can still go south. Here in Europe, we are demarcated by appellation of origin. If you are from Rioja, the grapes have to come from Rioja.”
For the global wine industry as a whole, the challenge is not merely warmer temperatures, but the oncoming, unending rush of change. Another study by Jones projected that the geographical bands suitable for winemaking would shift on average between 170 and 340 miles toward either pole in the next hundred years — a geographically small yet momentous shift. Some regions will become inhospitable to winemaking. Others will have to keep swapping in new varietals. And new frontiers will continually open up.
“If that ground is the best in the world for Pinot Noir, will it be the best for something else?” Jones says. “If Burgundy warms to the point where Pinot Noir and Chablis are not longer the best grapes for that region, will people buy a new product? … At some point a grower in a region that has become too warm has to make a decision. It’s like if you’re selling widgets, and widgets don’t sell anymore, what do you do? You have to come up with widgets 2.0.”
In North America, there’s no 1,000-year tradition of winemaking, so such transitions may not be as difficult. “Emerging regions in the U.S. are trying to grapple with what is the best variety,” says Colman, the wine blogger. “Long Island, for example. It [the wine industry] has been there only 30 years. They went with reds and thought Merlot was their calling card. But now they’re trying white wines.”
But heat is still heat. A recent climate model co-authored by Stanford climatologist Noah Diffenbaugh, Jones and two other scientists suggested that rising temperatures could end up shrinking Northern California’s prime vineyards by half over the next 30 years.
Such dire projections have become a sensitive issue; the Napa Valley Vintners, the wine industry trade association, commissioned a scientific temperature survey to demonstrate that the effects of climate change were being exaggerated. “The results, overall, provide good short-term news that consumers are not ‘tasting’ climate change in Napa Valley wines,” the association said earlier this year. However, the study did show that temperatures had risen an average of 1 to 2 degrees, mostly at night from January to August — a change that Jones says could indeed affect the taste of wines.
Even in Oregon, where the wine industry is expected to benefit from warmer temperatures, climate change is viewed with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Vintners point out that weather is variable — the past few years have been cool and wet — and that climate change is expected to bring more extreme weather events. “It’s a much more complex picture than, ‘on average temperatures are rising.’ If they rise at the wrong time or if weather patterns disrupt the growing season, then the increased degree days are not going to help,” says Don Crank, a winemaker at Willamette Valley Vineyards in Turner, Oregon. Climate change is expected to put other stresses on vineyards as well, including pests and rising competition for fresh water.
Yet Diffenbaugh’s study also suggested that it’s possible to make viticulture far more adaptable, preserving some vineyards and traditional grapes, even as the temperature rises. “We know growers can use pruning practices to increase shading. The orientation of the vines on a given piece of land can help reduce excess heat. Irrigation and trellising practices can be used to cool the plants,” Diffenbaugh says.
Tara Holland, an environmental scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is studying the ability of vintners to adapt to the demands of a changing climate, focusing on the emerging, 10-year-old wine industry in Prince Edward County near the northeastern end of Lake Ontario. There, Holland says, freezing temperatures are currently a problem: vintners must bury vines in the winter. If frost threatens the growing season, they now have to light fires and set up fans to blow smoke through the vineyards to create a warming thermal inversion. So winemakers in Prince Edward County are eagerly anticipating more warming.
Still, one of the principal problems wine makers everywhere will face is basic biology: Vines typically take several years to mature and then produce grapes for decades. Replacing them is both a disruption and a major investment. “I hear all the time, if the temperature goes up, it’s great, we’ll plant Shiraz,” Holland says. “But once you plant a vine, it’s in the ground for 50 years. It’s not an adaptation that’s really possible if you have all your fields planted.”
But overall, Jones says, there’s reason for optimism because the world is a big place, with many potentially suitable sites for vineyards. “Where there is cash involved, people will make it happen,” he says. “Whether they make it happen historically as we’ve known it, or relative to some new system in the future, remains to be seen.”
If the temperature increase is catastrophically extreme, though, all bets are off. “If by 2080 it’s too hot to make wine in southern England, what’s the rest of Europe going to look like?” asked Selley, the British author. “You’ll have to switch to making palm wine.”
