What
Climate Change Means for Wine Industry
By
Mark
Hertsgaard
Categories: Agriculture
John Williams has been making wine in California's Napa Valley
for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers
call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will
affect Napa's world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost
insulted.
"You
know, I've been getting that question a lot recently, and I
feel we need to keep this issue in perspective," he told
me. "When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear
that it's going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities,
displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases
and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I get calls from
wine writers and all they want to know is, 'How is the character
of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?'
I worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity
scale, not the vineyard scale."
Williams is the founder
of Frog's Leap, one of the most ecologically minded wineries
in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for the
operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot
vines. The heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal
system that taps into the earth's heat. The vineyards are 100
percent organic and - most radical of all, considering Napa's
dry summers - there is no irrigation.
Yet despite his environmental
fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog's
Leap for the impacts of climate change. "We have no idea
what effects global warming will have on the conditions that
affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems
to me to be whistling past the cemetery," he says, a note
of irritation in his voice. "All I know is, there are things
I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and
those are things I should do."
Williams has a point about
keeping things in perspective. At a time when climate change
is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh to find
enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what might
happen to premium wines.
But there is much more to
the question of wine and climate change than the character of
pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive
to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system
for problems that all food crops - and all industries - will
confront as global warming intensifies.
In vino veritas, the Romans
said: In wine there is truth. The truth now is that Earth's
climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and
virtually every other business on earth, is preparing for.
All crops need favorable
climates, but few are as vulnerable to temperature and other
extremes as wine grapes. "There is a 15-fold difference
in the price of cabernet sauvignon grapes that are grown in
Napa Valley and cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in Fresno"
in California's hot Central Valley, says Kim Cahill, a consultant
to the Napa Valley Vintners' Association. "Cab grapes grown
in Napa sold [in 2006] for $4,100 a ton. In Fresno the price
was $260 a ton. The difference in average temperature between
Napa and Fresno was 5 degrees Fahrenheit."
Numbers like that help explain
why climate change is poised to clobber the global wine industry,
a multibillion-dollar business whose decline would also damage
the much larger industries of food, restaurants, and tourism.
Every business on earth
will feel the effects of global warming, but only the ski industry
- which appears doomed in its current form - is more visibly
targeted by the hot, erratic weather that lies in store over
the next 50 years. In France, the rise in temperatures may render
the Champagne region too hot to produce fine champagne.
The same is true for the
legendary reds of Châteauneuf du Pape, where the stony
white soil's ability to retain heat, once considered a virtue,
may now become a curse. The world's other major wine-producing
regions - California, Italy, Spain, Australia - are also at
risk.
If current trends continue,
the "premium-wine-grape production area [in the United
States] ... could decline by up to 81 percent by the late 21st
century," a team of scientists wrote in a study published
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
The culprit was not so much
the rise in average temperatures but an increased frequency
of extremely hot days, defined as above 35 degrees Celsius (95
degrees Fahrenheit). If no adaptation measures were taken, these
increased heat spikes would "eliminate wine-grape production
in many areas of the United States," the scientists wrote.
In theory, winemakers can
defuse the threat by simply shifting production to more congenial
locations. Indeed, champagne grapes have already been planted
in England and some respectable vintages harvested.
But
there are limits to this strategy. After all, temperature is
not the sole determinant of a wine's taste. What the French
call terroir - a term that refers to the soil of a given region
but also includes the cultural knowledge of the people who grow
and process grapes - is crucial.
"Wine
is tied to place more than any other form of agriculture, in
the sense that the names of the place are on the bottle,"
says David Graves, co-founder of the Saintsbury wine company
in the Napa Valley. "If traditional sugar-beet growing
regions in eastern Colorado had to move north, nobody would
care. But if wine grapes can't grow in the Napa Valley anymore
- which is an extreme statement, but let's say so for the sake
of argument - suddenly you have a global-warming poster child
right up there with the polar bears."
A handful of climate-savvy
winemakers such as Graves are trying to rouse their colleagues
to action before it is too late, but to little avail. Indeed,
some winemakers are actually rejoicing in the higher temperatures
of recent years.
"Some of the most expensive
wines in Spain come from the Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa regions,"
Pancho Campo, founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain,
says. "They are gettin almost perfect ripeness every year
now for Tempranillo. This makes the winemakers say, 'Who cares
about climate change? We are getting perfect vintages.' The
same thing has happened in Bordeaux. It is very difficult to
tell someone, 'This is only going to be the case for another
few years.'"
The irony is, the wine business
is better situated than most to adapt to global warming. Many
of the people in the industry followed in their parents' footsteps
and hope to pass the business on to their kids and grandkids
someday. This should lead them to think further ahead than the
average corporation, with its obsessive focus on this quarter's
financial results. But I found little evidence this is happening.
The exception: Alois Lageder,
a man whose family has made wine in Alto Adige, the northernmost
province in Italy, since 1855. The setting, at the foot of the
Alps, is majestic. Looming over the vines are massive outcroppings
of black and gray granite interspersed with flower-strewn meadows
and wooded hills that inevitably call to mind The Sound of Music.
Locals
admire Lageder for having led Alto Adige's evolution from producing
jug wine to boasting some of the best whites in Italy. Lageder,
in October 2005, hosted the world's first
conference on the future of wine under climate change.
"We must recognize that climate change is not a problem
of the future," Lageder told his colleagues. "It is
here today and we must adapt now."
As
it happens, Alto Adige is the location of one of the most dramatic
expressions of modern global warming: The discovery of the so-called
Iceman
- the frozen remains of a herder who lived in the region 5,300
years ago. The corpse was found in 1991 in a mountain gully,
almost perfectly preserved - even the skin was intact - because
it had lain beneath mounds of snow and ice since shortly after
his death (a murder, forensic investigators later concluded
from studying the trajectory of an arrowhead lodged in his left
shoulder).
He would not have been found
were it not for global warming, says Hans Glauber, the director
of the Alto Adige Ecological Institute: "Temperatures have
been rising in the Alps about twice as fast as in the rest of
the world," he notes.
Lageder heard about global
warming in the early 1990s and felt compelled to take action.
It wasn't easy - "I had incredible fights with my architect
about wanting good insulation," he says - but by 1996 he
had installed the first completely privately financed solar
energy system in Italy. He added a geothermal energy system
as well.
Care was taken to integrate
these cutting-edge technologies into the existing site. During
a tour, I emerged from a dark fermentation cellar with its own
wind turbine into the bright sunlight of a gorgeous courtyard
dating from the 15th century.
Going green did make the
renovation cost 30 percent more, Lageder says, "but that
just means there is a slightly longer amortization period. In
fact, we made up the cost difference through increased revenue,
because when people heard about what we were doing, they came
to see it and they ended up buying our wines."
The
record summer
heat that struck Italy and the rest of Europe in
2003, killing tens of thousands, made Lageder even more alarmed.
"When I was a kid, the harvest was always after November
1, which was a cardinal date," he told me. "Nowadays,
we start between the 5th and 10th of September and finish in
October."
Excess
heat raises the sugar level of grapes to potentially ruinous
levels. Too much sugar can result in wine that is unbalanced
and too alcoholic - wine known as "cooked" or "jammy."
Higher
temperatures may also increase the risk of pests and parasites,
because fewer will die off during the winter. White wines, whose
skins are less tolerant of heat, face particular difficulties
as global warming intensifies. "In 2003, we ended up with
wines that had between 14 and 16 percent alcohol," Lageder
recalled, "whereas normally they are between 12 and 14
percent. The character of our wine was changing."
A 2 percent increase in
alcohol may sound like a tiny difference, but the effect on
a wine's character and potency is considerable. "In California,
your style of wine is bigger, with alcohol levels of 14 and
15, even 16 percent," Lageder continued.
"I like some of those
wines a lot. But the alcohol level is so high that you have
one glass and then" - he slashed his hand across his throat
- "you're done. Any more and you will be drunk. In Europe,
we prefer to drink wine throughout the evening, so we favor
wines with less alcohol. Very hot weather makes that harder
to achieve."
There are tricks grape growers
and winemakers can use to lower alcohol levels. The leaves surrounding
the grapes can be allowed to grow bushier, providing more shade.
Vines
can be replaced with different clones or rootstocks. Growing
grapes at higher altitudes, where the air is cooler, is another
option. So is changing the type of grapes being grown.
But
laws and cultural traditions currently stand in the way of such
adaptations. So-called AOC laws (Appellation d'Origine Côntrollée)
govern wine-grape production throughout France, and in parts
of Italy and Spain as well. As temperatures rise further, these
AOC laws and kindred regulations are certain to face increased
challenge.
"I was just in Burgundy,"
Pancho Campo told me in March 2008, "and producers there
are very concerned, because they know that chardonnay and pinot
noir are cool-weather wines, and climate change is bringing
totally the contrary. Some of the producers were even considering
starting to study Syrah and other varieties. At the moment,
they are not allowed to plant other grapes, but these are questions
people are asking."
The greatest resistance,
however, may come from the industry itself. "Some of my
colleagues may admire my views on this subject, but few have
done much," says Lageder. "People are trying to push
the problem away, saying, 'Let's do our job today and wait and
see in the future if climate change becomes a real problem.'
But by then it will be too late to save ourselves."
If
the wine industry does not adapt to climate change, life will
go on - with less conviviality and pleasure, perhaps, but it
will go on. Fine wine will still be produced, most likely by
early adapters such as Lageder, but there will be less of it.
By the law of supply and demand, that suggests the best wines
of tomorrow will cost even more than the ridiculous amounts
they fetch today.
White
wine may well disappear from some regions. Climate-sensitive
reds such as pinot noir are also in trouble.
It's not too late for winemakers
to save themselves through adaptation. But it's disconcerting
to see so much dawdling in an industry with so much incentive
to act. If winemakers aren't motivated to adapt to climate change,
what businesses will be?
The answer seems to be very
few. Even in the Britain, where the government is vigorously
championing adaptation, the private sector lags in understanding
the adaptation imperative, much less implementing it.
"I bet if I rang up
a hundred small businesses in the U.K. and mentioned adaptation,
90 of them wouldn't know what I was talking about," says
Gareth Williams, who works with the organization Business in
the Community, helping firms in northeast England prepare for
the storms and other extreme weather events that scientists
project for the region.
"When I started this
job, I gave a presentation to heads of businesses," said
Williams, who spent most of his career in the private sector.
"I presented the case for adaptation, and in the question-and-answer
period, one executive said, 'We're doing quite a lot on adaptation
already.' I said, 'Oh, what's that?' He said, 'We're recycling,
and we're looking at improving our energy efficiency.' I thought
to myself, 'Oh, my, he really didn't get it at all. This is
going to be a struggle.'"
"Most of us are not
very good at recognizing our risks until we are hit by them,"
explains Chris West, the director of the British government's
Climate Impact Program. "People who run companies are no
different."
Before joining UKCIP in
1999, West had spent most of his career working to protect endangered
species. Now, the species he is trying to save is his own, and
the insights of a zoologist turn out to be quite useful.
Adapting to changing circumstances
is, after all, the essence of evolution - and of success in
the modern economic marketplace. West is fond of quoting Darwin:
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives ...
nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is
the most adaptable to change."
This
piece was adapted from Mark Hertsgaard's forthcoming book Hot:
Living
Through the Next 50 Years on Earth for the Climate
Desk collaboration.
Mark
Hertsgaard has written about climate change for 20 years for
publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time and
The Nation. His book on adaptation, titled Hot: Living
Through the Next 50 Years on Earth, will be published
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt later this year.
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