Hmmm, maybe there’s something to that “Wines grown in England during the Medieval Warm Period” after all. I think maybe the French are upset that Scottish wine might be served with kippers rather than truffles. Oh the horror!
From the UK Telegraph:
Best wines will come from Scotland if climate change is not stopped, French chefs say
Prominent French chefs have given warning that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled.
excerpts:
President Nicolas Sarkozy was posed a stark choice: save French wine by clinching a deal at the international climate conference in Copenhagen in December, or see generations of viticulture slowly die out as vineyards cross the Channel and head north.
“As flagships of our common cultural heritage, elegant and refined, French wines are today in danger,” 50 leading names from the world of French wine and food wrote in an open letter. “Marked by higher alcohol levels, over-sunned aromatic ranges and denser textures, our wines could lose their unique soul.”
Among the signatories were Marc Veyrat, a chef with three Michelin stars, Mauro Colagreco, the award-winning chef, and Franck Thomas, who was voted the best sommelier in the world. The message was also supported by a host of domains from Champagne to Languedoc-Roussillon.
Climate change has been blamed for degrading French vineyards, with heatwaves, giant summer hailstorms in Bordeaux and new plant diseases.
The signatories said that if global temperatures rose by more than two per cent before the end of the century, “our soil will not survive” and “wine will travel 1,000 kilometres beyond its traditional limits”.
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Nah, Scottish make Whiskey, not wine. Wine is girly booze. No True Scotsman would make wine.
You know, this could be a parody. The French sometimes make good parody economic parables, like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlemakers%27_petition
“Help, help, global warming is creating COMPETITION!” If you have any doubt as to the anti-market political orientation of warmers, well…they fear that AGW may threaten their vice grip on the wine industry. Darn that capitalism!
Actually, the parallels are striking:
“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.”
Albion is of course England, and “he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us” is a reference to England’s reputation as foggy.
And the Sun is to blame you know. 😉
Those well known climate experts the french chefs declare global warming is real?
I dont know about you chaps but I am going to rethink my whole denialist point of view, if a bunch of french cooks says AGW is real then who are we to cast doubts?
Absolutely brilliant. A lovely comedic vintage with touches of plum, raspberry and a smooth chocolate finish! There has been no fruitier well of taste (less) humor since Moliere’s “The Misanthrope.”
Can we expect the same from the shores of the States United? In February the Symposium of Professional Wine Writers packed the Culinary Institute of America to hear NY Times’ Frank Priel discuss wine and climate change. Stay tuned.
More… sobering: Senator Nick Minchin, Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Senate gave a blistering speech today:
“This is of course the perpetuation of a cruel hoax on the Australian people, childishly simplistic and misleading. The scheme proposed does not deal with carbon. It purports to deal with something quite separate—carbon dioxide emissions—and the scheme does not deal with pollution.”
http://tinyurl.com/q9tq3w
Flanagan (11:18:07) :
If you look here (+39° 20′ 50.22″, +8° 58′ 5.04″). That’s where we used to park our 2 mobile avionics workshops back in the late 70s early 80s.
Out on the pan where you see the aircraft parked was regularly 120ºF+
If you go a few hundred yards North, there’s a road running roughly East-West
Follow that back to the ‘H’ blocks which was where we bunked. I can’t remember where the club was exactly but the overnight was regularly close to 90ºF this time of year.
DaveE.
timetochooseagain (12:55:49) :
Don’t tell the Scots they make whiskey, that’s the Irish!
The Scots make Whisky!
DaveE.
Most current day French vineyard rootstocks were and are originally imported from Texas from the native wild mustang grapes that grow across Texas. This rootstock saved France’s grape industry in the early 1900s when phylloxera decimated the wine and vineyards of Europe.
So what are they worried about – it really gets hot in Texas and they already have the correct rootstocks.
This is a publicity stunt by Greenpeace and some minor domains…
As for the “heatwave” July was cold and rainy for most of France.
Diogenes (11:25:23) : You wrote: “I notice that on your map Chablis seems to have migrated to Provence.”
This is a poor map for various reasons but the one you mention is actually that Provence is not labeled at all, even though it is shown. So the problem is the brownish colors are too similar and even the map-maker got lost.
I once used this map for a presentation and had to fix it first.
The French just don’t know how to market climate disasters. Anybody remember the “Ice Wine” post? Now that was some imaginative marketing. Maybe the French could come up with something like natural sunkissed “raisin” wine! Or Vine Aged Wine.
Wine was introduced in France mainly by Romans and vine survived in France since 2000 years through Little Ice Age and Medieval warm period. So don’t worry !
This article was wroten in the newpaper Le Monde who is a huge RCA catastrophist … and very sensitive to NGO, Greenpeace for his article …
http://www.actualites-news-environnement.com/21295-changements-climatiques-professionnels-vin-alarme.html
http://qc.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090811/sciences/environnement_vin_climat_r__chauffement_1
And the UK telegraph forget Greenpeace …. ? !
We will be drinking french wines for a long time to come.
Wine from Schotland? I don’t think so.
I guess French chefs might just as well get in there and argue the science. The door has been opened to everyone. And why should Scotland not be allowed to have a wine industry. On second thought, skotch might have to be made in Greenland.
Dave Wendt (11:45:37) :
You’re too late. Wine harvest dates have been used as a climate proxy for decades (see for example Le Roy Ladurie 1967. Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil, Chapter 2). As a matter of fact it is probably one of the better proxies, correlation with the average temperature of the growing season is excellent during the instrumental period. Ladurie also notes that the warmest years usually had the best vintages. Sarkozy would probably profit from reading him, particularly since he is one of the greatest french historians.
As unmotivated and blase as the French are, you would think they would welcome the change: More alcoholic content -> get drunk quicker -> don’t have to spend as much money on cigarettes. Seriously, is this all they have to worry about over there in France?
AGW means the French get fried, their wines are toast. Frankly, it’s l’absurde.
Well hard cheese, didums to them, then.
Aye Laddie, would that be a red wine or white to go with me kippers?
tty (14:51:34) :
Dave Wendt (11:45:37) :
You’re too late. Wine harvest dates have been used as a climate proxy for decades (see for example Le Roy Ladurie 1967. Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil, Chapter 2)
Hey, just because it’s been done before shouldn’t be that much of drawback. From what I’ve observed of “climate scientists” they’ve all been repeatedly beating the same small herd of dead horses for decades, all the while having no difficulty garnering the next research grant from the government science trough. Governments here and worldwide have invested more than the combined cost of the Manhattan and Apollo projects in funding “climate research” which has lead to a state of human knowledge that is now just about as clueless regarding the climate as it was 25 years ago. Given that. I see no reason why my vital wine tasting…er…wine derived temperature proxy analysis project should be denied funding. The politicians have been doing their best to drive me to drink for years, it’s about time they offered to pick up the tab.
Dave Wendt (11:45:37) :
I’m more than willing to offer my expert biological processing & analysis to your project.
As long as I’m not required to
sampletest the ‘Deci Red’ A concoction sold by the 5Ltr plastic container just outside the air base at Decimomannu Sardinia. I will leave that one to less discerningtaste budsbiological analysts. 😉DaveE.
What? French wines are in jeopardy? Now that’s a climate change effect that all connoisseurs should really worry about!
Flanagan (11:18:07) : Southern France is havong quite a heat wave for the moment – more than 40 celsius in many places. Spain and Italy are not safe either. In Spain, several places had 30+°C… during the night!
40C, 104 F, my God Man, that’s almost a nice day for a swim! (Where I grew up, that was what we called “normal” for just about any July or August day, and “cooled off a bit” for some… Highest I personally remember was 117F, with lots of days 110F and any day in June, July, August, and parts of May / September could be over 100F).
“Not Safe”? 30C is “not safe”? 86 F is “not safe”? I now live in the “cool part” of California near the coast and there have been times it was well into the 90+F range at night.
What kind of wimpy people can’t take 40C ?
One of my favorite vacations was in Phoenix Az in summer. There was that odd moment when I got out of the (solar heated) swimming pool and into the “hot tub” only to find that the (required by law to be regulated temperature) hot tub was colder than the pool … at 105F for the “hot” tub and about 115F for the pool …. The pool had dark tiles set in the bottom for solar heating with visual flair, but they put a few too many in for August… IIRC, the air temp was 120F or so that day. It was the same year they shut down the airport because the tarmac was melting in the sun… IIRC it was 126F or so near the tarmac. We decided not to move to Arizona. (I liked it, but the spouse, not so much)… Still remember the discussion we had in the car after hearing on the radio that the airport was melting, flights were cancelled, and airplanes were being routed to the concrete for parking… wonder what the melting temperature is for asphalt… Now THAT was a warm day… actually changed into shorts when we got back to the hotel and decided to skip the steak and have a chef salad for dinner. Oh, the shame… AND I ordered an oversized soda. It was so stressful… 😉
Did I mention they have wineries in Arizona …
http://www.catchwine.com/wineries/arizona/
And one of the longest growing seasons and highest productivity per acre of the nation?
True story, BTW…
It seems that grape growers started global warming in the first place:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/18/ancient.global.warming/index.html
Well, (French) farmers anyway.
/sarcasm
A single malt wine, light, fruity, just a hint of peat.
Definitely Scottish.
E.M.Smith (17:27:20) :
Personally, I didn’t like the 90ºF nights in Sardinia, nor the 120ºF+ days. It was however ‘safe’ just personal preference. 😉
DaveE.