Too warm for wine
Believe what you will about the causes and likely effects of global warming, but all around us there is irrefutable evidence that it is happening.
From crops maturing earlier to animals changing their habits, it seems likely that our grandchildren are going to have to dramatically adapt to a different way of living, like it or not. Where it affects staple foodstuffs it is understandable that the world’s government agencies step in with their three ha’ppence-worth, as no-one can be seen to be doing an ‘ostrich’. But where wine is concerned, are people really worried? After all, we cannot live without grain or animal products but we can live without wine – well, at a pinch……
Can we?
I wrote four years ago that French champagne growers had been spotted reconnoitring the orchards of Kent in search of a potentially cooler growing climate than the Champagne region is likely to become. It has already started, with a 1.2ºC rise in average temperatures during the growing season in the last 50 years. It is no joke when people say that it would not be out of the question to make Bordeaux or Burgundy wines there now.
Indeed, southern England now has the same climate as Champagne had 25 years ago – that’s how fast things are changing, and explains why English wines are currently better than ever before.
I was mulling this over the other day after attending a presentation of a new Spanish winery. I will spare the blushes of the owners in view of what follows, but ,suffice to say, I was not the only person present who voiced similar concerns.
This is a typical long-running success story but one that could end in tears.
Two Spanish businessmen, having built up a successful courier business from a local to international level, over many years finally sold out for a huge amount of money. What to do with such a vast sum, as they were still relatively young and active?
Well, the almost obligatory hobby-business for wealthy Spaniards these days is to buy a winery. When I was in Somontano recently, the landscape was littered with emblematic bodegas designed by the world’s leading architects. No doubt, all of them commissioned by some newly-rich property developer from Madrid or wherever who had decided that his obituary would not be complete unless he had put his name to a new range of wines.
Every Spanish wine region is witness to the same phenomenon!
So, happily admitting that they knew nothing about wine, our two heroes bought 150 hectares of agricultural land in Extremadura. They built the obligatory steel and concrete monstrosity of a bodega, hired the best ‘flying winemaker’ brains from California and Australia and took on a 140-strong workforce.
Yes, you heard right: 140, and that’s year-round and yet I have been in larger bodegas that run with six men for most of the year!
Anyway, after spending several hundreds of millions of euros they produced their first three wines. To be fair I am not aware of what the whole exercise really cost them, but it must be well into the high seven figures.
The wines we tasted were okay, but nothing more. The media agency they had appointed ensured that neither the bottle nor the label remotely resembled any other wine on the market - and I won’t give away the plot by mentioning the stupid name the wines go under.
So, here’s the killer: the particular region of Extremadura where our heroes have established their ‘world-beating’ Spanish winery just happens to be one of the several in this country that will be most affected by climate change.
Pancho Campo, Al Gore’s Spanish alter-ego in Spain, claims that it is now common to find grapes that have been literally burnt by ultraviolet rays, rather as they burn the human skin. The result is a too-early harvest and a wine with undesirable tastes. Bearing in mind that Spain is the world’s largest vineyard (1.2 million hectares), clearly anything that is going to reduce quality can have dire consequences for the economy of the country.
Temperatures are expected to rise more than two degrees by 2050, affecting all vineyards from California to China, but the zones that are reckoned to lose out most are in Portugal and southern Spain. It could be the final coup de grace for the already-ailing sherry industry, and in all regions the grape harvest takes place between 10 and 12 days earlier that it used to. The 2007 harvest in all Spain was 10% down on the previous year.
The Miguel Torres winery has planted 104 hectares of vines 1,000m above sea level in the foothills near Tremp – four times higher than their main winery near Penedes, west of Barcelona. All Catalan wine-makers will have to shift production north to avoid their vines shrivelling up, Torres predicts. The majority of Catalonia’s traditional wine-producing regions will become “totally unviable” within 40 or 70 years, according to research by Torres’s wine scientist, Xavier Sort, “In the next 10 years, we will see that grapes that do well today by the sea will move to the central valley. Those in the central valleys, such as tempranillo will go up to the mountains.”
In La Rioja climate change became noticeable six years ago. Grapes in the colder zones of Rioja Alta (Upper Rioja) started maturing better, producing harvests of a quality that surprised everyone.
The wine map of Europe is moving north, by about 20 to 25 miles every decade. Red wines from hot, dry regions such as La Mancha will contain more alcohol and less acid. For Pancho Campo the danger is of wines becoming too alcoholic and losing their sophisticated bouquet; lower acid content and higher Ph levels do not help, but one of the main problems is an increasing susceptibility to contamination. A partial solution, he avers, is to clone present grape varieties to produce vines that are more disease-resistant and more stable in changing climatic conditions.
So, what will our enthusiastic winemakers from Extremadura do when the going gets too hot? After such a huge investment a move north is hardly on the cards…
