Wine: A barometer of global warming

Vintners in France forced to change ways grapes are grown

ROUFFACH, France – On a cobweb-encrusted rafter above his giant steel grape pressers, Rene Mure is charting one of the world’s most-tangible barometers of global warming.

The evidence, scrawled in black ink, is the first day of the annual grape harvest for the past three decades. In 1978, it was Oct. 16. In 1998, the date was Sept. 14. This year, harvesting started Aug. 24 – the earliest ever recorded, not only in Mure’s vineyards but in the entire Alsace wine district of northeastern France.
“I noticed the harvest was getting earlier before anybody had a name for it,” said Mure, 59, the 11th generation of his family to produce wine from the clay-and-limestone slopes of the Vosges Mountains near the German border. “When I was young, we were harvesting in October with snow on the mountaintops. Today, we’re harvesting in August.”

Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and threatening the survival of centuries-old winegrowing regions.

In the hot Mediterranean vineyards – the first to feel the effects of longer, drier summers – vintners are harvesting grapes at night to protect the fragile fruit at the critical picking stage. Growers in Spain, Italy and southern France are buying land at higher terrains for future vineyards.

Some champagne producers in northern France – whose grapes were ready for harvest in August, earlier than in any year on record – are eyeing properties in southern England, the current beneficiary of planet warming. The British wine industry is re-emerging for the first time in the 500 years since a minor ice age cooled Europe.

The Arizona Republic