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(Adapted from Mark Hertsgaard’s forthcoming book Hot:
Living Through the Next Fifty John Williams, the founder of Frog’s Leap, has been making wine in 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. "I’ve been getting that question a lot, 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." Frog’s Leap is one of the most ecologically minded wineries in Napa. 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 impact 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. 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 our climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and virtually every other business, is preparing for. All crops need favorable climates, but few are as vulnerable to temperature and other extremes as wine grapes. "There is a fifteen-fold difference in the price of Cabernet grapes grown in Napa and Cab grown in Fresno (California’s hot Central Valley)," says Kim Cahill, a consultant to the Napa Valley Vintners Association. "[In 2006] Napa Cab sold for $4,100/ton. Fresno Cab was $260/ton. The average temperature difference between the two was five degrees F." These numbers help explain why climate change is poised to clobber the global wine industry, a multibillion-dollar business whose decline would also damage the food, restaurant, and tourism industries. Every business on Earth will feel the effects of global warming, but only the ski industry is more visibly at risk from 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. California, Italy, Spain, and Australia are also at risk. If current trends continue, the "premium wine grape production area [in the U. S.]...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 (above 95 degrees F). 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 of global warming by 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, for 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, the climate, and 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 place names are on the bottle," says David Graves, co-founder of Saintsbury in 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, an extreme statement, suddenly you have a global warming poster child 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. Some winemakers are even rejoicing in the higher temperatures of recent years. "Some of the most expensive wines in Spain come from Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa," Pancho Campo, founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain, says. "They are getting almost perfect ripeness every year now for Tempranillo. The same thing has happened in Bordeaux. But this is only going to be the case for another few years." The irony is that the wine business is better situated than most to adapt to global warming. Many in the industry followed in their parents' footsteps and hope to pass the business on to their kids and grandkids someday. They think further ahead than the average corporation with its obsessive focus on the present quarter's financial results. But I found little evidence for this. An exception is Alois Lageder, 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 call to mind The Sound of Music. Locals admire Lageder for leading the evolution from jug wine to some of the best whites in Italy. In October 2005, Lageder hosted the first conference on the future of wine under climate change. "Climate change is not a problem of the future," he told 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 here 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. (Investigators concluded he had been murdered after they studied 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, director of the Alto Adige Ecological Institute. "Temperatures have been rising in the Alps twice as fast as in the rest of the world," he notes. Lageder heard about global warming in the late 1980s 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 to 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 most of 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."
(Continued Next Month) |
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