by Mark Hertsgaard
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John Williams has been making wine in California’s
Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his
peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will
affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted.
“You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we
need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about
global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic,
inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people,
spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I
get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the
character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I
worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale,
not the vineyard scale.”
Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically
minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for
the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot
vines; the heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that
taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic
and-most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers-there is no
irrigation.
Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions
about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have
no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that
affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to
be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his
voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least
slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”
Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time
when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh
to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what
might happen to premium wines. But there is much more to the question of
wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine
grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry
amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops—and
all industries—will confront as global warming intensifies. In vino
veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The
truth now is that the earth’s climate is changing much faster than the
wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing
for.
All crops need favorable climates, but few are as vulnerable to
temperature and other extremes as wine grapes. “There is a fifteenfold
difference in the price of cabernet sauvignon grapes that are grown in
Napa Valley and cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in Fresno” in
California’s hot Central Valley, says Kim Cahill, a consultant to the
Napa Valley Vintners’ Association. “Cab grapes grown in Napa sold [in
2006] for $4,100 a ton. In Fresno the price was $260 a ton. The
difference in average temperature between Napa and Fresno was 5 degrees
Fahrenheit.”
Numbers like that help explain why climate change is poised to
clobber the global wine industry, a multibillion-dollar business whose
decline would also damage the much larger industries of food,
restaurants, and tourism. Every business
on earth will feel the effects of global warming, but only the ski
industry—which appears doomed in its current form—is more visibly
targeted by the hot, erratic weather that lies in store over the next 50
years. In France, the rise in temperatures may render the Champagne
region too hot to produce fine champagne. The same is true for the
legendary reds of Châteauneuf du Pape, where the stony white soil’s
ability to retain heat, once considered a virtue, may now become a
curse. The world’s other major wine-producing regions—California, Italy,
Spain, Australia—are also at risk.
If current trends continue, the “premium wine grape production area
[in the United States] … could decline by up to 81 percent by the late
21st century,” a team of scientists wrote in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences in 2006. The culprit was not so much the rise in average temperatures but an increased frequency of extremely hot days, defined
as above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). If no adaptation
measures were taken, these increased heat spikes would “eliminate wine
grape production in many areas of the United States,” the scientists
wrote.
In theory, winemakers can defuse the threat by simply shifting
production to more congenial locations. Indeed, champagne grapes have
already been planted in England and some respectable vintages harvested.
But there are limits to this strategy. After all, temperature is not
the sole determinant of a wine’s taste. What the French call terroir—a
term that refers to the soil of a given region but also includes the
cultural knowledge of the people who grow and process grapes—is crucial.
“Wine is tied to place more than any other form of agriculture, in the
sense that the names of the place are on the bottle,” says David Graves,
the co-founder of the Saintsbury wine company in the Napa Valley. “If
traditional sugar-beet growing regions in eastern Colorado had to move
north, nobody would care. But if wine grapes can’t grow in the Napa
Valley anymore—which is an extreme statement, but let’s say so for the
sake of argument—suddenly you have a global warming poster child right
up there with the polar bears.”
A handful of climate-savvy winemakers such as Graves are trying to
rouse their colleagues to action before it is too late, but to little
avail. Indeed, some winemakers are actually rejoicing in the higher
temperatures of recent years. “Some of the most expensive wines in Spain
come from the Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa regions,” Pancho Campo, the
founder and president of the Wine Academy of Spain, says. “They are
getting almost perfect ripeness every year now for Tempranillo. This
makes the winemakers say, ‘Who cares about climate change? We are
getting perfect vintages.’ The same thing has happened in Bordeaux. It
is very difficult to tell someone, ‘This is only going to be the case
for another few years.’”
The irony is, the wine business is better situated than most to adapt
to global warming. Many of the people in the industry followed in their
parents’ footsteps and hope to pass the business on to their kids and
grandkids someday. This should lead them to think farther
ahead than the average corporation, with its obsessive focus on this
quarter’s financial results. But I found little evidence this is
happening.
The exception: Alois Lageder, a man whose family has
made wine in Alto Adige, the northernmost province in Italy, since
1855. The setting, at the foot of the Alps, is majestic. Looming over
the vines are massive outcroppings of black and gray granite
interspersed with flower-strewn meadows and wooded hills that inevitably
call to mind The
Sound of Music. Locals admire Lageder for having led Alto
Adige’s evolution from producing jug wine to boasting some of the best
whites in Italy. In October 2005, Lageder hosted the world’s first conference
on the future of wine under climate change. “We must recognize that
climate change is not a problem of the future,” Lageder told his
colleagues. “It is here today and we must adapt now.”
As it happens, Alto Adige is the location of one of the most dramatic
expressions of modern global warming: the discovery of the so-called Iceman—the
frozen remains of a herder who lived in the region 5,300 years ago. The
corpse was found in 1991 in a mountain gully, almost perfectly
preserved-even the skin was intact—because it had lain beneath mounds of
snow and ice since shortly after his death (a murder, forensic
investigators later concluded from studying the trajectory of an
arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder). He would not have been found
were it not for global warming, says Hans Glauber, the director of the
Alto Adige Ecological Institute: “Temperatures have been rising in the
Alps about twice as fast as in the rest of the world,” he notes.
Lageder heard about global warming in the early 1990s and felt
compelled to take action. It wasn’t easy—“I had incredible fights with
my architect about wanting good insulation,” he says—but by 1996 he had
installed the first completely privately financed solar energy system in
Italy. He added a geothermal energy system as well. Care was taken to
integrate these cutting-edge technologies into the existing site; during
a tour, I emerged from a dark fermentation cellar with its own wind
turbine into the bright sunlight of a gorgeous courtyard dating to the
15th century. Going green did make the renovation cost 30 percent more,
Lageder says, “but that just means there is a slightly longer
amortization period. In fact, we made up the cost difference through
increased revenue, because when people heard about what we were doing,
they came to see it and they ended up buying our wines.”
The record summer
heat that struck Italy and the rest of Europe in 2003, killing tens
of thousands, made Lageder even more alarmed. “When I was a kid, the
harvest was always after November 1, which was a cardinal date,” he told
me. “Nowadays, we start between the 5th and 10th of September and
finish in October.” Excess heat raises the sugar level of grapes to
potentially ruinous levels. Too much sugar can result in wine that is
unbalanced and too alcoholic—wine known as “cooked” or “jammy.” Higher
temperatures may also increase the risk of pests and parasites, because
fewer will die off during the winter. White wines, whose skins are less
tolerant of heat, face particular difficulties as global warming
intensifies. “In 2003, we ended up with wines that had between 14 and 16
percent alcohol,” Lageder recalled, “whereas normally they are between
12 and 14 percent. The character of our wine was changing.”
A 2 percent increase in alcohol may sound like a tiny difference, but
the effect on a wine’s character and potency is considerable. “In
California, your style of wine is bigger, with alcohol levels of 14 and
15, even 16 percent,” Lageder continued. “I like some of those wines a
lot. But the alcohol level is so high that you have one glass and
then”—he slashed his hand across his throat—“you’re done; any more and
you will be drunk. In Europe, we prefer to drink wine throughout the
evening, so we favor wines with less alcohol. Very hot weather makes
that harder to achieve.”
There are tricks grape growers and winemakers can use to lower
alcohol levels. The leaves surrounding the grapes can be allowed to grow
bushier, providing more shade. Vines can be replaced with different
clones or rootstocks. Growing grapes at higher altitudes, where the air
is cooler, is another option. So is changing the type of grapes being
grown.
But laws and cultural traditions currently stand in the way of such
adaptations. So-called AOC laws (Appellation d’Origine Côntrollée)
govern wine-grape production throughout France, and in parts of Italy,
and Spain as well. As temperatures rise further, these AOC laws and
kindred regulations are certain to face increased challenge. “I was just
in Burgundy,” Pancho Campo told me in March 2008, “and producers there
are very concerned, because they know that chardonnay and pinot noir are
cool-weather wines, and climate change is bringing totally the
contrary. Some of the producers were even considering starting to study
Syrah and other varieties. At the moment, they are not allowed to plant
other grapes, but these are questions people are asking.”
The greatest resistance, however, may come from the industry itself.
“Some of my colleagues may admire my views on this subject, but few have
done much,” says Lageder. “People are trying to push the problem away,
saying, ‘Let’s do our job today and wait and see in the future if
climate change becomes a real problem.’ But by then it will be too late
to save ourselves.”
If the wine industry does not adapt to climate
change, life will go on—with less conviviality and pleasure, perhaps,
but it will go on. Fine wine will still be produced, most likely by
early adapters such as Lageder, but there will be less of it. By the law
of supply and demand, that suggests the best wines of tomorrow will
cost even more than the ridiculous amounts they fetch today. White wine
may well disappear from some regions. Climate-sensitive reds such as
pinot noir are also in trouble. It’s not too late for winemakers to save
themselves through adaptation. But it’s disconcerting to see so much
dawdling in an industry with so much incentive to act. If winemakers
aren’t motivated to adapt to climate change, what businesses will be?
The answer seems to be very few. Even in the Britain, where the
government is vigorously championing adaptation, the private sector lags
in understanding the adaptation imperative, much less implementing it.
“I bet if I rang up a hundred small businesses in the U.K. and mentioned
adaptation, 90 of them wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” says
Gareth Williams, who works with the organization Business in the
Community, helping firms in northeast England prepare for the storms and
other extreme weather events that scientists project for the region.
“When I started this job, I gave a presentation to heads of businesses,”
said Williams, who spent most of his career in the private sector. “I
presented the case for adaptation, and in the question-and-answer
period, one executive said, ‘We’re doing quite a lot on adaptation
already.’ I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ He said, ‘We’re recycling, and
we’re looking at improving our energy efficiency.’ I thought to myself,
‘Oh, my, he really didn’t get it at all. This is going to be a
struggle.’”
“Most of us are not very good at recognizing our risks until we are
hit by them,” explains Chris West, the director of the U.K. government’s
Climate Impact Program. “People who run companies are no different.”
Before joining UKCIP in 1999, West had spent most of his career working
to protect endangered species. Now, the species he is trying to save is
his own, and the insights of a zoologist turn out to be quite useful.
Adapting to changing circumstances is, after all, the essence of
evolution—and of success in the modern economic marketplace. West is
fond of quoting Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that
survives … nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is
the most adaptable to change.”
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