From HARVARD UNIVERSITY, where you can’t tell them much.
A changing climate, changing wine
To adapt to warmer temperatures, winemakers may have to plant lesser known grape varieties, study suggests
Cambridge, MA (January 2, 2018) — If you want to buy good wine, Elizabeth Wolkovich says stop looking at labels and listen to your taste buds.
An Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Wolkovich is among the co-authors of a new study, which suggests that, though vineyards might be able to counteract some of the effects of climate change by planting lesser-known grape varieties, scientists and vintners need to better understand the wide diversity of grapes and their adaptions to different climates. The study is described in a January 2 paper in Nature Climate Change.
“It’s going to be very hard, given the amount of warming we’ve already committed to…for many regions to continue growing the exact varieties they’ve grown in the past,” Wolkovich said. “But what we’re interested in talking about is how much more diversity of grape varieties do we have, and could we potentially be using that diversity to adapt to climate change.
“The Old World has a huge diversity of winegrapes – there are over planted 1,000 varieties – and some of them are better adapted to hotter climates and have higher drought tolerance than the 12 varieties now making up over 80% of the wine market in many countries,” she continued. “We should be studying and exploring these varieties to prepare for climate change.”
Unfortunately, Wolkovich said, convincing wine producers to try different grape varieties is difficult at best, and the reason often comes down to the current concept of terroir.
Terroir is the notion that a wine’s flavor is a reflection of where, which and how the grapes were grown. Thus, as currently understood, only certain traditional or existing varieties are part of each terroir, leaving little room for change.
“There’s a real issue in the premier wine-growing regions that historical terroir is what makes great wine, and if you acknowledge in any way that you have climate change, you acknowledge that your terroir is changing,” Wolkovich said. “So in many of those regions there is not much of an appetite to talk about changing varieties.”
But even if that appetite existed, Wolkovich said, researchers don’t yet have enough data to say whether other varieties would be able to adapt to climate change.
“Part of what this paper sets up is the question of how much more do we need to know if we want to understand whether there is enough diversity in this crop to adapt wine regions to climate change in place,” said Ignacio Morales-Castilla, a co-author of the study and Fellow at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University who investigates which winegrape varieties will adequately mature where under climate change. “Right now we know we have this diversity, but we have little information on how to use it. One of our other suggestions is for growers to start setting aside parts of vineyards to grow some other varieties to see which ones are working.”
But even if researchers came to the table armed with information about grape diversity, Wolkovich said the industry – both in the traditional winegrowing centers of Europe and around the world – still faces hurdles when it comes to making changes.
In Europe, she said, growers have the advantage of tremendous diversity. They have more than 1,000 grape varieties to choose from, research repositories such as INRA’s Domaine de Vassal that study this diversity, and expertise in how to grow different varieties. Yet strict labeling laws have created restrictions on their ability to take advantage of this diversity.
For example, just three varieties of grapes can be labeled as Champagne or four for Burgundy. Similar restrictions have been enacted in many European regions- all of which force growers to focus on a small handful of grape varieties.
“The more you are locked into what you have to grow, the less room you have to adapt to climate change,” Wolkovich said. “So there’s this big pool of knowledge, and massive diversity, growers have maintained an amazing amount of genetic and climactic response diversity…but if they changed those laws in any way in relation to climate change, that’s acknowledging that the terroir of the region is changing, and many growers don’t want to do that.”
New World winegrowers, meanwhile, must grapple with the opposite problem – while there are few, if any, restrictions on which grape varieties may be grown in a given region, growers have little experience with the diverse – and potentially more climate change adaptable – varieties of grapes found in Europe.
Just 12 varieties account for more than 80 percent of the grapes grown in Australian vineyards, Wolkovich said, more than 75% percent of all the grapes grown in China are Cabernet Sauvignon – and the chief reason why has to do with consumers.
“They have all the freedom in the world to import new varieties and think about how to make great wines from a grape variety you’ve never heard of, but they’re not doing it because the consumer hasn’t heard of it,” Wolkovich said. “In Europe, people do blend wines…but in the New World, we’ve gotten really focused on specific varieties: ‘I want a bottle of Pinot Noir,’ or ‘I want a bottle of Cabernet.’
“We’ve been taught to recognize the varieties we think we like,” she said. “People buy Pinot even though it can taste totally different depending on where it’s grown. It might taste absolutely awful from certain regions, but if you think you like Pinot, you’re only buying that.”
As Wolkovich sees it, wine producers now face a choice: proactively experiment with new varieties, or risk suffering the negative consequences of climate change.
“With continued climate change, certain varieties in certain regions will start to fail – that’s my expectation,” she said. “The solution we’re offering is how do you start thinking of varietal diversity. Maybe the grapes grown widely today were the ones that are easiest to grow and tasted the best in historical climates, but I think we’re missing a lot of great grapes better suited for the future.”
###
I really hope China goes green
If the grape varieties won’t grown the ‘traditional’ growing areas vintners will have a choice – move the location of their vineyard northward or change varieties they make their wine from or go out of business. In the past, vineyards moved.
As my wife, the biology major says, “Nature offers you three choices: move, adapt, or die.”
You forgot IGNORE – my grapes love the heat and it does get cool enough here in Niagara Canada at night…though I can absolutely tell you right now there will be lots of young vine die-off due to this prolonged cold spell. My vines NEVER die due to heat – just sayin’ to all those wine drinkin’ greenies
However, it should indeed be difficult to get the vinters to plant other varieties when there has been no warming. Did they have to switch during the warm up from 1978 to 1988? No one has ever mentioned any such actions.
As there has been no significant global warming since 1988 and we are currently cooling into a Maunder or Dalton-type cool period at the very least, they certainly should think about what varieties did well in the 1970s.
The assumption that we committed to two degrees of warming is the old “science is settled” misdirection, a key part of the scam of AGW.
Granting that some varieties are more “climate fragile” than others, isn’t the inter-annual temperature variation much larger than the “catastrophic” 2°C warming we allegedly face?
Yes, vintage years do vary greatly and in general, but not always, the warmer years are considered superior. Growing regions with a strong coastal influence can be atypical and unrelated to the average temperature of the planet. Probably the worst vintage here in the Napa Valley in the last two decades was 1998, a cool late season. (What pray tell was the 1998 global temp?) I have been reading about our eminent climate demise since, but I think it is a bit early to start talking about changing grape varieties. We’re doing fine.
In the premium growing regions of France and California most of viticultural practice is focused on promoting early ripening to avoid wet and cold harvest weather. Lots of room to adapt here in the vineyard with rootstocks, canopy management, vine stress management and other things that delay ripening. And you can alter winemaking technique too and adapt to changing grape composition.. In the Napa Valley the prospect of warmer nighttime temperatures is generally a plus making for softer and more balanced tannins in the flavor. Oh, and vineyards here still require frost protection! Looking at the forecast I imagine quite a few growers on the East Coast are concerned about winter kill this week.
My favourite Chateau Chunder may become unavailable … oh no.
I love this sort of junk science they always forget if CAGW really happens areas that can’t currently support the varieties will be able to. The true Worst case one winery may go broke or have to change grapes and a new winery in a new area will rise to take it’s place. It’s called adaption and almost everything except climate scientists can manage it.
I wonder if this woman has any experience in wine making or viticulture .
New Zealand produces amazing wine and some of our best reds are produced in Hawkes Bay on gravel soils south of Napier with extremely low rain fall over the summer and early autumn .Rain fall before harvest can cause many problems and the Indian summers that go on and on are what the wine makers are thankful for .
Did she not know that the Romans grew grapes in the north of England 2000 years ago .
Oh, that so often we don’t know, what we don’t know. Consider that enology and viticulture are some of the longest studied, most researched sciences. (Anyone heard of Louis Pasteur?) Don’t tell Ms. Wolkovich, but there are actually Departments of Viticulture and Enology at many universities around the world that predate the Department of Orgasmic (sorry) and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, some by a century. The body of research and the great scientists who have worked in this field would astound anyone who took the time to look. The subject of how grape varieties respond to different climatic condition and what grows best under what circumstances has been thoroughly studied. There is a large body of knowledge that exists. Not just at the universities, wine grapes are grown successfully in just about every country and every circumstance you can imagine. In California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Texas, Virginia, Chile, Argentina, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand….I could go on. The point is there is a lot of experimental and practical experience here that is quite easy to tap. No help needed from Harvard.
America is such a great place. Idiots like the authors have jobs and even get published in Nature!
I wonder if you polled real vineyard owners and wineries as to what the long term threat and opportunities are to their businesses, would climate change even be mentioned? For instance, if I were a french winemaker contemplating 2100, I might worry whether my now majority Muslim France would even permit winemaking.
Quran 4:43 “Do not approach prayers while you are drunk.”
This sounds to me like an “attach climate change to my pet project to have a hope of making it relevant”. While I applaud her attempts to improve variety of grape cultivation, as this will improve resilience to blights and probably improve taste, the tack-on of climate seems particularly stretched in this case.
Pura mierda. Good years in France are the warm years. They suffer from lower sugars often.
And in Austrailia or California they can harvest earlier if need be and won’t worry so much about frost. Yes, they could also move north as new regions become warm enough. So what. Nothing we can do about it. Que sera sera.
“Austrailia” is that place also spelled Oz.
Google “Napa Degree Days” to see graph published for annual degree days 1920 to present published by UCSD. Napa and St.Helena look safe for now growing Cabernet and Chardonnay. Many fine vintages in that span.
In planning for the re-planting a large vineyard in the Napa Valley spread over varied terrain I placed a dozen weather stations to measure air and soil temp, rainfall, wind speed, etc. Using that information as well as hundreds of deep trenches by backhoe to study soil depth and composition a plan was put together. My instruments revealed that there were sites within the 850 acres that varied from one another by 700 degree days.
I noticed that my temperature data varied greatly from the three ghcn reporting stations within the Napa Valley all of whom showed much warmer temps. I then visited these sites. The nearest one was at the fire station in the middle of town surrounded by asphalt. the other two were equally affected by urban development.
[Thank you. 700 Centigrade or Fahrenheit degree days? .mod]
One of the saddest things I’ve seen in this whole fiasco was a farmer in Canada who ripped out an orchard to plant Cabernet Savignon grapes. He had been told the Napa Valley would soon be too warm, and Canada would be the place to grow them. He said something on the lines of “they had better be right, I’ve staked everything on this”
Do you have a link? Sounds a bit urban-legendish!
Nope it is real, I was living up there and it was a local paper. Can’t find that particular one, but search Climate change, Okanogan wine and you’ll see they are planning on it.
“Industry veteran and Hainle Vineyards Estate Winery owner Walter Huber told BIV that climate change helped spur him last year to pull out 10 acres of Chardonnay and Pinot Gris vines and replace them with Pinot Noir.
This year he intends to continue his winery’s transformation by tearing out another seven acres of white-varietal vines and replacing them with the red varietals Merlot and Zweigelt.”
https://www.biv.com/article/2015/3/vintners-warming-climate-change/
Please – whining about loss of ICE WINE grapes in mainland Canada’s natural warmest micro-climate – not the wisest business decision. This current cold spell in Niagara Canada (not only us) is brutal but perfect for 1000+ acres of ice wine harvest – traditional rules stating -8 deg C for 4 days in a row…nobody pulling ice wine grapes here – though it is a well controlled production to ensure the usual $40US/350mL price
I do not recommend Chateau Migraine.
A warmer world bad for wine? What utter nonsense. Both the ‘warmer’ and the ‘bad’.
I did a wine tour near Stanthorpe in Queensland last year. It’s on a plateau at 1km altitude with hot summers but really cold winters. They are experimenting with hardy European varieties and are producing wines from grape varieties I had never heard of. An up and coming wine region.
Stanthorpe used to be a centre of tin mining, hence the name. The people there are known as the ‘brass monkeys’.
Does it get cold enough there to freeze……………..off brass monkeys?
Yes. One of the things that truck me were the nettings protecting the vines, thousands of square meters mounted over them. At first I thought to keep birds out, but it turned out to be protection against hail storms. Whether they need protecting against monkeys too I wouldn’t know.
Did you need that truck to bring the grapes in after harvesting?
Champagne is extremely dependent upon temperature. A single degree either way can prevent proper ripening in that particular area because of its peculiar microclimate.
It’s such a shame that all the warming to date must have ruined champagne. Any you see on the shelves is surely a figment of your imagination….
Sounds like sour grapes to me.
+1
…or a quick publication for promotion and academic output measure in the publication mill.
Europe, especially France, has many restrictions that can be relaxed. They are in the process of reconfiguring Champagné at this time. Other rules, such as no irrigation can be replaced.
Many growers use misters to keep vineyards from getting to very hot temperature.
In the U. S. growers have been free (more or less; some shipping restrictions into some states) to plant anything they want and can find. And do. CA, WA, and other states have research stations that work with all sorts of old and new varieties grown under different conditions.
A new vineyard will begin producing in 3 years and be doing well in 6. “Old vines” (>25 years) have plenty of time to establish themselves before “catastrophic global warming” kicks in.
These folks need to relax.
A day without wine is like a day without sunshine. Wine is sunshine in a bottle.
The Washington State University, Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center
Oh for Pete’s sake! Don’t these idiots know that it’s cold that is a limiting temperature factor? Take a plant from a cold northern climate and transplant it in the warm south and it will thrive. Not the inverse.
For 50 years we’ve been hearing doomsday prediction after doomsday prediction and how many of them have come to pass???
Good grief, to once more quote the renowned thinker C. Brown (or was it Linus?).
Meanwhile, back in reality, France loses 50% of its bourdoux grape harvest last year because of early-frost loss….
Just wait until after the PDO/AMO are both in their 30-year cool cycles and a Grand Solar Minimum event kicks in from 2020…
The wine and coffee industries will be devastated from early frost loss as they naively believed in the Global Warming Ho@x and have been extending growing areas in high-risk frost areas for the past 30 years that will be wiped out when global temps start to cool…. idiots..
But Elizabeth Wolkovich is correct saying-
“If you want to buy good wine, stop looking at labels and listen to your taste buds!.
That has served me (& my wallet) well for the last 50 yrs
Only response is Shiraz…. Hunter Valley.
Temperatures max is often 40ish Celcius, can reach 45C.
And some of the best red wines in the world.
Clare Valley, another premium wine region.. Maximum can peak around 43C
Meanwhile in the real world, typical French varietals like Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah are successfully grown in southern Spain…. I’d suggest that Bordeaux and Burgundy aren’t about to reak into a sweat about this….
This stuff is so tedious. Part of the Al Gore campaign instructions is to choose things that people like (beer, wine, chocolate) and then claim that global warming will damage them, or even make them disappear entirely (chocolate is gone by 2038, apparently).
Chocolate, huh? Yeah, sure. What’s next? The Disappearance of the Vanilla Bean?
This “paper” is what “climate communication” is all about:
Pick a topic that speaks to something people care about, tasty wine. Then make ridiculous historically illiterate claims about the climate doom facing wine.
Rationalize the doom with ignorant scenarios.
Get the pals to peer review (rubber stamp) the paper for publication at an alarmist hype journal.
Something that educated upper middle class people who vote regularly care about.
This is beyond ‘first world problems.’
Let them drink cake.
Let them eat beer.
Let them shovel snow.
Sheer nonsense, the Romans made plenty of nice wines I am sure, as did other places.
Its like these “scientists” never read a history book!
I doubt that. From what I’ve read, wine in the time of Rome’s heydays was far closer to vinegar than what we would recognize as wine.
We face a hellish climate apocalypse and science funding goes to parsing butterflies and wine varietals. Just shows you even scientists don’t really believe the hype. It’s a major – yuge! – source of funding for tangential, wasted-money sciencey-science studies.
Prof. Wolkovich, like all these Alarmist studies do, is assuming facts that are not in evidence. Namely, that humans have or will cause the Earth’s climate to do things it wouldn’t normally do.
What convinced Prof. Wolkovich that humans are changing the climate? That Dishonest Hockey Stick chart? That must be it, because there is no other indication that CO2 and temperatures correlate.
Oh, for Pete’s sake!!! I could fall down laughing but I won’t.
I needed a cheap burgundy to make boeuf bourguignon, so i bought a bottle of Burlwood pinot noir for the sauce. For $5, it isn’t too bad. Not abrasive, a little tannicky for my taste, but it’s a 2016 and one more year in the bottle wouldn’t have hurt it. But it doesn’t replace my Beaujolais Villages, which is a Burgundian blend from France. Just try to pry it from my cold, dead hands!
I found a good Spanish white wine Vina Godeval, NOT made with the palomino grape, and it’s not just good, but does a fine job on pollo en salsa poblano gratinada. I also like the Spanish Rioja reds. And a cheap Tuscan red will go with just about everything, including celery stuffed with garlic-chive-laced cream cheese, and pasta with chicken, broccoli and mushrooms.
France had a late freeze a couple of years ago, and this past summer, they had heat. Heat concentrates the sugars in the grapes. Richer flavor. What’s not to like?
Wisconsin has vineyards. So does Michigan (or they did). There’s vineyards all over the place in this country. I have to try some of the stuff from Oz, too. I haven’t seen any NZ stuff showing up, but I may be looking in the wrong shop.
Gee whiz, next, these “experts” will be telling us that hops are in danger! No hops, no beer. No beer, no pizza! A culinary disaster!!!!
Oh Wow, Sara! You cook all that? Is that, like, a regular thing for you?
If so… {leans up against the bar}… how YOU doin’?
🙂
rip
Yes, ripshin. Yes, I do. I enjoy it thoroughly, too. When the weather warms up a tad, I will repair to Binny’s and grab a bottle of Calvados (apple brandy) so that I can make a really good tarte aux pommes a la Normande (Norman apple tart). I may add the Calvados to my grandma’s chopped apple cake, too. The alcohol cooks off. It’s the flavor I’m after.
Oh yeah, love me some Calvados. I generally prefer cognac or armagnac, but certainly partook of the spirit of the apple when I was in the area. Good stuff.
Also, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but apparently your belief regarding residual alcohol content in baked goods is somewhat inaccurate: https://oureverydaylife.com/alcohol-cook-out-baked-goods-41245.html
According to the GCMs (Good Cooking Manuals), the Transient Alcohol Response to a doubling of baking temperature is a factor of .5. Note, this value is highly disputed by some chefs, but since none of those deniers has ever published a recipe in a legitimate cookbook, we can confidently ignore their anti-baking agenda. They’re probably just shills for big alcohol anyway.
rip
The hops demise scare is sooooo … 2016.
We live in the upper part of the Yakima Valley in Washington State. A few people grow hops for fun and pleasure. Just south of us — closer to the City of Yakima — is the commercial growing area. You can read about it here: Hops scare
Truth is, about 20 years ago the hops folks did have a growing problem . . . and fixed it.
They have been expanding.
One of the biggest is HAAS
OH, geezo Pete, I was just kidding about ‘no hops!
[No hops, no hope. .mod]
Biggest problem for the hops growers is meeting demand.
In my opinion and experience; Aus for reds, NZ for whites. While both Aus and NZ do produce good whites and reds, the soils in Aus suit reds more. East coast of NZ (Volcanic soils) for whiles from Marlborough, Wairarapa, Napier etc. Aus has vines that are a couple of hundred years old in some places IIRC. Either way you will not be disappointed and far too good for cooking. Google Keith Floyd.
I was doing very well on my 2018 diet until I read your post!
The whole idea of the paper is too stupid to be worth reading.
An Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology desperately seeking relevance.
I can’t stand it anymore! If we really could control the climate, and we wanted to make everything better for people and the biosphere in general, WE WOULD MAKE IT WARMER! Especially, at night and in the higher latitudes! Such a thing would be absolutely fabulous for nearly everyone and everything, including wine! Constantly spinning something that is obviously wonderful into unending tails of doom and gloom, must be some kind of mental illness.
Too bad the warming is not going to happen nearly as much as they keep predicting, and periods of ‘global cooling’ are very likely in the mix.
Nonono, the delicate balance of Nature, poor people in the developing countries, and polar bears. We need to keep the climate exactly as it was, including variance and natural disasters.
Talking about conservative? The people who talk for conservation are conservatives, for real. So called conservatives are often utilitarians, ready for a good change.
In the last few days there was a piece on, I think, UK’s Sky News, where the future of French Champagne was claimed to be in doubt because the warming climate means the grapes ripen earlier and are sweeter. Poor things are going to have to adjust their processing methods. Funny how this is a crisis but the ability of entrepreneurs in northern England, at a latitude of 53N and 260m elevation and on NW-facing slopes to boot is seen as good news.
I should have written “… but the ability of entrepreneurs in northern England …”.
” SHOULD have written “… but the ability of entrepreneurs in northern England TO GROW WINE SUCCESSFULLY AND PROFITABLY…”. Clearly, too much wine!
See my comment above at 10:37. – – – reconfiguring Champagné
100 years ago, wine experts laughed at the notion of high quality California wines.
If the quality of existing vinyards goes down, other regions will step in to pick up the slack.
Ain’t the free market wonderful.
Find and read about:
The Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 — known as the Judgment of Paris
Here is one: Stag’s Leap
I find wine from the Rapel Valley in Chile to have a certain friendliness to it. It ain’t just for France any more, y’know.
If it comes down to it, which I doubt, I would assume that if it’s too warm in a region for a grape, why don’t they simply grow the grape at a higher latitute? Porbablt some esoteric reason not to, knowing the wine people, who generally I consider jerks and frauds. Wine sucks anyway. I never buy the stuff.
Wine is quite useful in places where the water is likely to kill you. The history of wine is fascinating.
Some say milk is good for you. I can’t vouch for that. And you can cook with milk too!
Translated from the original Harvardese: Oh, no. Farmers are going to have to think and adapt to changing conditions, but they are so stupid — none of them went to Harvard — they will never be able to figure it out.
For the record, I have advocated for the Federal government to shut Harvard down, apply its endowment to the Federal Debt, and use the dormitories to house poor senior citizens.
What does this mean? “It’s going to be very hard, given the amount of warming we’ve already committed to…
I saw that, too, Pat – a really odd turn of phrase. As near as I can tell, what it means is “we the consensus, have agreed that the climate is going to warm by X (large number) therefore it will actually happen..” Seems a bit presumptuous to me.
The phrase “the amount of warming we’ve already committed to…” means someone believes the carbon dioxide already released will stay in in “cycle” for a very long time and its damage will be cumulative. Further, if humans stop all GHG (sic) emissions today, the heating of the atmosphere will continue because of the “blanket” effect.
This is all in the Hansen/Mann/Gore Katechism (HMGK), that I guess you haven’t read.
. . . or believed, anyway!
Auto
I guess…that seems even more presumptuous then my impression – so it’s probably true. No, I’m unlikely to read that much BS, I have a life.
Now THAT WILL BE A DISASTER for the 1% and ever-bleeding-heart Hollywood millionaires — all the effort they’ve put in to remember the names of three or four “prestigious” wines and their grape varieties will be wasted if things change!
They might even have to memorize new wine names…..
You can’t dull the vineyard quality if it is already killed off by the cold.
The variation in temperature or climate from year to year is far larger than what you can expect even over ten years of climate change.
But you can use it as an excuse when you produce a crap wine. Stop using your SUV, then my wine will improve.
Obviously, Ms. Wolkovich doesn’t understand agriculture, viticulture or biology at all. I doubt she even knows what a good glass of wine really is. I would be willing to bet that the closest she gets to knowing anything about wine at all is when someone hands her a glass of it at a party and tells her to drink it while it’s still cold, when we all know that the bouquet blossoms when you let your hands warm it.
Definitely not an oenophile. She should stick to her chosen field of Organismics (almost left some letters out of that!) and stay in her corner. I’d listen to an old homme de pays before I’d pay attention to anything she says. What a silly cow.
Who will win the 2018 Jeffrey Sachs Award in waste of time and pseudo-research efforts? This study is in the running.
… and if the Queen had balls, she … MAY … be King.
More of the same “may” “what if” “could be” … “science” of Global Warming
They should read Leroy Laduries classic “Times of feast times of famine, a history of climate since the year 1000”. One of the main climate proxies used is the date of the grape harvest and the quality of the vintage which is known since ‘way back in France as You might imagine. The equation is: warm year = early ripening and good wine.
To misquote that fellow from Rosebud, I will diss no wine before suppertime.
Made many drunkable wines at home. And some not so. The wild fox grapes were my favorite. Hot and dry summers made the high sugar content and large yield as long as I got to them before the wild turkeys. Second best was dandelion as long as I kept the flower pickers away from the big plants next to the fence posts.
Don’t you just love the priorities of global warming alarmism – screw the peasants, we are worried about the wine. Very Marie Antoinette – let them eat cake! In the event that CAGW was real, its nice to know what he Harvard luvvies priority is!
This is an amazing example of elitism. Someone who goes to great lengths to say that “we” have too little data to decide this or that must nevertheless convince people in a particular business to change their ways.
I know people who own vineyards, one of them in Maryland (of all places). Their knowledge of horticulture in general, and wine making in particular, probably exceeds the knowledge of “climate” “scientists” on all of the subjects they purport to know of, combined. Amateur scientists who merely ask well thought-out questions about climate science are pilloried as “deniers.” But amateur viniculturists who throw their climate “science” weight around are treated seriously.
This one deserves to go in the trash bin.
More nonsense from the “Climate Change To (I’m a twat)” department.
Back in the real world winter COLD and late frosts are killing wine grape 🍇 production:
https://www.iceagenow.info/burgundy-wine-growers-verge-bankruptcy/
https://www.iceagenow.info/france-worst-wine-harvest-since-1945/
Quoted from JimBob, Gerry, England:
The Grape vine is one of the few fruiting plants domesticated by man that is heavily climate change intolerant, the potato is another.
It will grow in cooler climates but not fruit as well, as in the warmer temperate climates such as central southern Europe.
My garden in the English midland is currently at its Northern edge. If AGW had been based on real, proven science instead of a politisized ologists fraud we should have expected grapes to be harvested in the Central belt of Scotland within 10 to 15 years. Unfortunately, back in the real world, the opposite is happening. Encroaching cold is reducing the range where wine 🍷 grapes can be grown. As Gerry, England reports:
The 2017 cold spring and late frosts “Hit us in the south-east of England where most wine is produced. A local I spoke said he lost 75% of blossom but said there could be a second one but not as good as the first. What caused this were TWO – yes just 2 – heavy frosts in mid April. Damaged other plants, even oak trees showed leaf damage.”
More drip feed ‘climate change will affect’ when there is really no significant climate change.