Guest essay by Eric Worrall
“We’re getting white wines this year more like ones from the Mediterranean.”
Climate Change Hits Germany, and Winemakers Couldn’t Be Happier
From Riesling to Pinot Noir, extreme summer boosts quality and quantity of German wines.
By Iain Rogers
22 September 2018, 17:00 GMT+10The Braunewell family has been practicing the ancient art of viticulture in the picturesque hills above the Rhine River since the middle of the 17th century. This year’s grape harvest, at the end of Germany’s second-warmest summer on record, is their earliest ever.
Across Germany, the “Weinlese” is in full swing, and vintners are delighted with what promises to be an excellent year in one of the unique upsides to global warming. For Stefan Braunewell — who runs his family’s vineyard in Essenheim near Mainz with his grandfather, parents and brother — that means gathering the region’s famous Riesling crop four weeks earlier than usual.
“Of course, climate change brings challenges, but these challenges are manageable,” Braunewell said in an interview. “We can’t stick our heads in the sand. It’s nature, and you have to deal with it.”
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As Braunewell and his peers can attest, however, a long, hot summer has upsides for winemakers above and beyond the early harvest. Ample sunlight increases sugar content, while dry weather keeps fungi from attacking the crop.
“I don’t think we have ever seen such healthy grapes,” Braunewell said. “It’s a bit of a crazy year for us, but the quality is good. The sugar content is excellent, the ripeness is very high and the aroma is great.”
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“It goes against the trend as everyone is struggling these days with stress and sensitive stomachs,” Theo Gehring said in an interview at the vineyard he runs with his wife outside the town of Nierstein in the Rheinhessen region. “We’re getting white wines this year more like ones from the Mediterranean.”
Climate changes mean that the entire wine map is shifting. Gehring says he would have to relocate 300 kilometers (190 miles) to the north to produce the same kind of wines as 40 or 50 years ago.
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This good news climate change story emphasises the implausibility of wild claims that a few degrees warming would threaten food supplies. Even if global warming does occur on the scale predicted by climate worriers, all that will happen is growing regions will shift a few hundred miles North (or South in the Southern Hemisphere).
A lot of heat records fell in Denver this spring and summer. And…
We had the best harvest of Concord grapes in years. Thousands of clusters in my back yard. And..
A bear leaped our 6-foot privacy fence and greeted my wife at eye level while she was harvesting cucumbers before both went lickety-split in opposite directions.
The Friðheimar tomato farm in Iceland is a 24/7/364 operation that demonstrates human ingenuity at its finest.
A year is too long ago for warmies to recall.
French winegrowers face poorest harvest since 1945 (Oct 2017)
Grapes don’t care about fake temperature records. They care about what the real temperature is.
Only humans of the past 50 years bemoan warmer temperatures. ALL OTHER times and civilizations who lived in those other times bless the warmth.
Alaska is having the best Indian Summer evah! We broke 64 record highs in September across the State. The Kenai Penninsula broke 70 degrees F in September. I am psyched. And 11,000 years ago, my vacation home was under a glacier.
Yep, a quite decent summer this year, but highest recorded temperature in Norway is still from 1901 (35,6C). Move on – nothing to see here…….
Picture = YUMMY
“It’s nature, and you have to deal with it.”
— If the waters are going to be rougher, will the solution be to build a contraption that will calm the waves of the ocean, or to sail in a bigger boat?
I have visited the Rhine in July every year, apart from two, since 2000. One of the reasons I go is to photograph trains on the lines on either side of the Rhine. This year I had to give up as it was far too hot: into the 30s. Last year I had to give up, too. That was because it was too wet. And it wasn’t particularly warm, either. There was another year when I had to give up because it was too hot but most years the temperature has been warm but comfortable I can’t say I’ve noticed any great change in the temperature over the period 2000 to 2018. Variations between years, yes. But overall It doesn’t feel like it. But that’s just my personal impression.. I would be interested to see temperature figures for the area between Koblenz and Bingen for the last twenty years. However, one indicator of the weather is the wine harvest. According to this vintage chart for German Riesling the score varies between 98 in 2001 and 89 in 2013. I’ve no idea what these scores mean but there’s no evidence of any upward trend between 2001 and 2016. The highest scores were in 2001 and 2005.
https://www.winespectator.com/vintagecharts/search/id/6
And wine expert Jancis Robinson says this about 2014, only four years ago:
‘Too cold and too wet’ is the general summary for Germany in 2014.
https://www.jancisrobinson.com/learn/vintages/germany