eBusiness Weekly
Seventy percent of the world’s winemaking regions could become unsuitable for growing wine grapes if global temperatures exceed 2°C above the pre-industrial average.
This tally comes from a recent study in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment that compiled decades of research exploring the potential impact of climate change on viticulture.
“The regions that are most threatened are regions that are already hot and dry because those regions are likely to get both hotter and drier,” said Gregory Gambetta, a viticulturist at the Université de Bordeaux in France and a co-author on the study.
However, vineyards in every region will experience their own set of stressors, from extreme weather to disease, that will make it more difficult to grow and produce wine.
“The challenge in one area may not be the challenge in another,” Gambetta said.
Viticulture, or agriculture related to grapevines, is a practice thousands of years old that takes place in almost every region and climate in the world. Growing grapes and producing and consuming wine have become integral to cultural identities and economies.
“The grapevine is a very adaptable plant that has room to grow in a lot of different climates.”
“The grapevine is a very adaptable plant that has room to grow in a lot of different climates,” Gambetta said.
Grape growers have spent centuries figuring out how to best grow grapes and produce wine in their regions, specializing in a few vine cultivars that grow particularly well there.
That’s why, for example, Argentina is known for its malbec, California its cabernet sauvignon, New Zealand its sauvignon blanc, and France its merlot.
Every region has experienced historic climate shifts, Gambetta said, and has worked out strategies to adapt, such as adding irrigation or adjusting how vines are spaced, trained, pruned, or shaded (vineyard management).
Regional cultivars have shifted in the past but have remained fairly steady for several decades.
However, as human-driven climate change warms the globe, alters weather patterns, worsens drought, and heightens extreme weather, many vineyards will be pushed to or past their limits.
Gambetta and his colleagues combed through existing research and created a compendium of how global winemaking regions will fare under moderate and extreme climate change scenarios, what the major threats will be, and how each region may adapt to the oncoming hazards. — https://eos.org/
