Some Like it Hot, But Not Grapes

As Lisa says a few posts back, one way or another we're doomed. This particular piece of global warming doom may come to fruition too late to affect anyone currently reading this blog, but it's still a bombshell for an industry that's pretty important to places like California, Oregon, and increasingly right here in New Mexico: the wine industry.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences forecast an 81 percent drop in the U.S. areas suitable to grow premium wine grapes by the year 2099.

Should we worry about something that's not going to happen for another ninety seven years? After all, even our grandchildren might not be around by then. Well, perhaps yes, since the study is talking about days of temperatures over ninety-five degrees, temperatures that wine grapes and human beings both may have difficulty surviving in areas, like the Napa Valley, where the climate has been a friend to both.

Even the most heat-tolerant grapes can only take this kind of extreme heat for 14 days each season, Diffenbaugh said. The new study projected as many as 50 or 60 such super-hot days in a season.

Two months of superhot days in Arizona would not be a surprise, but in the Sonoma area, in the Willamette Valley (prime Oregon wine growing territory, where some fabulous Pinot Noirs are made), they would be certain death to an entire industry. And what a pleasant industry it is, one that makes life more civilized for us all. These changes will take place gradually, of course, although the entire projection of climate change is happening much faster than the original models predicted.

The folks who started a winery on a property across the road from us when we lived on Cape Cod may not have been as crazy as we thought! The article where I found this news leads with this sentence: "Ready for Cape Cod Cabernet? "

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