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Climate Change: A Reality You Can Taste in Wine
by Jim Gordon
What is wine going to be like in a post-climate change world? Well, we don’t have to wait to find out. The future has been creeping up on us for some time:
Late April 1980, St. Helena, Calif.–I woke up in the middle of the night. My heart pounded. A loud, buzzing roar like fighter planes revving on the deck of an aircraft carrier broke the 3 a.m. quiet of my street. It was the first spring that I lived in Napa Valley, and for a few seconds I couldn’t identify the sound.
Then I realized it must be coming from the wind machines, even though I’d never heard them before. A farmer whose vineyard was near my house had ignited the monstrous internal combustion engines that ran the low-tech, high-horsepower frost prevention equipment. Each consisted of an 18-foot tower with an airplane-like propeller mounted on top. A gas-guzzling engine powered it at high speed.
The farmer positioned the propellers to blow mostly horizontally but slightly down. The propeller blades blew like crazy while each mount rotated slowly to blow air in a 360-degree arc. The blades caught the slightly warmer air at 18 feet up and blew it out and down into the vines. There the temperature on this early spring night had dropped to about 30 degrees.
Warmer air, even just slightly warmer air, the farmer knew, might save his crop of Napa Gamay or Zinfandel on that typically cold pre-dawn morning. Bud break, the first appearance of new green shoots on the winter-dormant vines, had come a week or two before. New shoots are easy prey for frost, which can destroy newly burst buds and the tender tissue which will give rise to grape bunches.
A severe frost could easily cut one’s crop in half and/or delay its ripening into the rainy season which often started in late October. Rain at harvest was as bad for quality as frost damage in the spring was for quantity.
March 14, 2008, Carneros, Calif.– The 2008 vintage in Northern California began. I noticed bud break in at least one Carneros vineyard this day, meaning the growing season had begun.
That very same day I saw wind machines twirling in a nearby vineyard. Electricity powered these propellers, which hummed much more quietly than the nightmare machines of yesteryear. The manager was testing his frost-protection equipment to see if it was ready for use on any cold nights that still might be coming. But the threat of frost in Napa Valley in 2008 is minimal compared to what it was a generation or two ago.
In 1980, experienced Napa Valley growers understood that frost could occur as late as May 10. But today, the threat of frost is over by April 1. A recent study of temperatures in Napa Valley recorded over 50 or more years showed that the growing season has extended just as much in fall, as well.
Grapevines in Napa Valley have gained forty-five days of good weather on each end of the growing season, according to the study. That’s a gain of three months during less than a lifetime — during the career of, say, Napa winemaker Mike Grgich, who celebrates his 50th harvest this year.
A longer growing season means longer hang time for grapes on the vine and generally riper fruit at harvest. It makes a grape grower’s life easier, too, because there are fewer foul-weather problems and usually cleaner grapes, free of mold.
In general, I think the longer growing season has brought better quality wines. I like riper, richer, more flavorful wines in most cases, and those are much more plentiful today. Winemakers and drinkers rightly debate whether it’s nature or nurture that has wrought the stylistic changes.
I am sure that better trellises, smarter (less) irrigation, the use of varieties more suited to the region and clones of those varieties better suited to individual vineyard sites have contributed much to the flavor evolution.
But three more months of growing season? That’s a gigantic change, and Napa Valley is not the only place it’s happening. Climate change is real, it’s documented, and we’re tasting it every day. I said I like richer wines. But they are plenty rich enough already. So what happens in another 25 years?
Filed under: Vineyards, Industry Issues
5 Responses to “Climate Change: A Reality You Can Taste in Wine”
Please Wait
March 20th, 2008 at 7:04:45 AM
Are there entirely new wine regions newly available across the world for good grape production due to global warming?
March 20th, 2008 at 5:14:15 PM
It’s easy to confuse climate change with weather. Climate change happens very slowly and noticeable in 100 year time frames, not decades. The warmest year in the U.S. is still 1941. If we were being told that there was global cooling we would be all over the record snowfall over the U.S., the snowpack in the Sierras, the freezing winter in Russia and China, and the first snow in recorded history in Baghdad as signs of cooling. Instead we jump on any weather event that might be unusual as a sign of global warming.
I think an April 1 cut off for frost in the Napa Valley is a bit premature. We will have night temps in the mid thirties this weekend and this is a sunny warm period. Frosts are weather and a cold snap can come at any time. In the last 40 years the majority of the vintages have been frost free in the Spring, but just one brief frost without protection and it’s disaster.
I have made wine in the Napa Valley for 40 years and while I have seen positive impact of rootstock, clonal selection, heat treated virus free vines, VSP, better water management, and closer spacing, but we still are impacted negatively by inclement weather. We protect much better against frost, but consider these Napa Valley vintages: 1967, 1972, 1982, 1998 & 2000. All too cool. Supposedly 1998 was the warmest year on the planet since the Little Ice Age. Everything should have been ripe by mid-September. The vintage of a century. Someone should tell that to the Wine Spectator.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:53:05 PM
Wine Enthusiast was the first consumer wine magazine to report ,in September 2006, on what scientists anticipate will happen to vineyards regarding climate change (use search on winemag.com, Voss, Buckley).
Some winemakers were buying elsewhere then. And the lovely rieslings of Germany and Alsace are among those where large changes are showing up. (Remember, there are temperature records back to around 1300 in Dijon and more than a few families have records back more than 600 years in Germany and Italy). And I agree with Morton, weather is not the same.
We take a look again, in the May ‘08 issue, at how the big wine and spirit companies are dealing with carbon footprint.
And, don’t laugh, it does include changing the lightbulbs.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:23:35 PM
Just a little update. I live next to a vineyard with a wind machine. Given the price of gas I assume that the guy is not turning it on in the middle of the night just to annoy me. So far this month he has awakened me on the 2nd,3rd,4th,5th, 7th, 15th(I paid my taxes the day before and was resting unusually peacefully) 16th, 20th and 21st. It was 26 degrees yesterday morning and he had the damned thing on a 2 AM. This morning he allowed me to sleep in, but it is cold as hell and I am still in polar fleece. Cab vines in Rutherford came out the later this March than they did in 1972. Snow is covering the ground in Seattle and in the yards of my relatives in Oregon. The snow pack in the Siskiyous is 350% above normal. The palm tree in my back yard is frozen and brown. Now, explain the impact of global warming I am feeling again?
April 28th, 2008 at 4:58:04 PM
I enjoy this magazine - have for years. I have an aversion, however, to not only being the intended subject of propaganda, but of paying for the publication in which it is published. So when I saw a “man-caused global warming is ruining wine” column in a recent issue, I had had enough. What was published in the magazine was NOT NEARLY as reasoned as what you read above - it was a misinformed op-ed screed I’d expect to see in any big city paper, blaming man for rising temperatures and insisting on drastic action to save the wine industry and the planet.
I immediately emailed the author, briefly and politely pointed out my objections, and asked him to cancel my subscription, effective immediately, which is the first time I’ve ever done anything like that.
If those who don’t know that the planet was once warm enough that wine grapes were grown in Greenland want to disagree, that’s certainly their right. Just don’t expect me to pay to read their uninformed opinions. I’m audacious enough to buy a wine magazine because I want to read about wine, not politics. Pity I won’t be buying or reading this one any more.