03/27/2024

Enjoy Your Favorite Wine Before Climate Change Destroys It

Extreme weather is making it harder to grow grapes in many traditional regions

Unless you've a cellar stockpiled to last you the rest of your life, climate change is probably coming for your favorite wine. Temperature fluctuations during the growing season create the flavors, alcohol content, and even color of your preferred fermented grape juice—producing a beautiful ballet in a bottle. So, as global temperatures soar and water availability in many regions plummets, the characteristics of individual wines are changing.

Up to 70 percent of today’s wine regions could be at substantial risk of losing suitability for production if the world warms more than 2 degrees Celsius, a new paper finds. (That’s the Paris Agreement’s absolute limit for warming above preindustrial temperatures.) Due to ever-fiercer droughts and heat waves, 90 percent of the traditional coastal and lowland wine growing regions of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California could be at existential risk by the end of the century. Meanwhile, rising temperatures are opening up new regions to growing, like the southern United Kingdom, as wine production generally shifts to higher latitudes and altitudes, where it’s cooler.

“It doesn’t mean that the wine-growing disappears—and that’s an important caveat—but it means that it can get a lot more challenging,” says viticulturist Greg Gambetta of Bordeaux Sciences Agro and the Institute of Science of Vine and Wine, lead author of the review paper, publishing today in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. “There’s actually a lot of room for adaptation for wine growers—if the warming is limited. This is true for most regions.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.