Good, long, in-depth article about climate change and wine

The New York Times featured a long and extensive article about how climate change (yes, it's happening) is affecting the wine industry globally.

How Climate Change Impacts Wine

By the way, the author of this piece is Eric Asimov, the NY Times wine critic.  Now, I'm a rare wine drinker, and definitely not a wine connoisseur.  So I haven't made a habit of reading NY Times columns about wine.  So, I'm sure that many of the people who do already knew if Eric Asimov is related to famed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.  I did not know.  So I looked it up, something that's easy to do in these wonderful information-rich days.  And as I suspected, he is related to Isaac, fairly closely -- he's his nephew.  Or was, to be precise, since Isaac sadly left us in 1992, due to complications of AIDS -- which I also just found out.  He got infected by HIV from a blood transfusion during triple bypass surgery.  Isaac also had two kids of his own, who are much lower profile than Eric, as they are noted in the Wikipedia bio, but not linked anywhere to more information.

That was quite a digression.  Sorry about that.  I'm going to extract three sections from the article and make a short comment on each of them.

1. "Producers are now planting vineyards at altitudes once considered inhospitable to growing wine grapes. No hard-and-fast rules limit the altitude at which grapes can be planted. It depends on a region’s climate, the quality of the light, access to water and the nature of the grapes. But clearly, as the earth has warmed, vineyards are moving higher. ... At higher elevations, peak temperatures are not necessarily much cooler, but intense heat lasts for shorter periods, and nighttime temperatures are colder than at lower altitudes. This increased diurnal shift — the temperature swing over the course of a day — helps grapes to ripen at a more even pace, over a longer period of time, than where temperatures remain relatively stable."

Comment:  This isn't exclusive to wine grapes.  Coffee growers are having to do the same thing. And climate change is directly affecting maize and potato cultivation.  Farmers don't really consider the scientific aspects of climate change, particularly whether or not it's happening.  They just do what they have to do in response to conditions that they can clearly tell are changing.

2. "For many producers, particularly small family estates or those in historic appellations, new vineyards in cooler environments are not an option. Instead, they must consider whether to change the essence of what they have been doing, in some cases for centuries. That might mean leaving behind the grapes that have long been associated with their region, and selecting ones more appropriate for the changing climate. It may seem impossible to imagine Bordeaux without cabernet sauvignon and merlot, or Champagne without pinot noir and chardonnay, but the prospect of a much warmer future may require even the most famous wine regions to rethink their methods."

Comment:  People wonder about the economic impact of climate change.  The canard "More CO2 makes plants grow more" doesn't consider all of the other impacts of increasing warmth and changing precipitation patterns.  But as this section shows, it's causing changes in long-established practices, practices which were established when the climate was much more stable and natural climate change rates were much slower.

3. "While weather always surprises, experienced farmers generally knew what to expect. With climate change, that is no longer true. “It hails when it never used to hail, rains in the summer when it used to be dry, is dry in the winter when it used to rain,” Gaia Gaja of the Gaja Winery, which has made wine in Barbaresco and Barolo for generations, told me in April. She said the increased moisture in summer has caused vine pests to reproduce faster, with four cycles a year rather than two. Forest fires, floods, droughts — wine regions will have to learn how to deal regularly with these once-rare devastations."

Comment:  It's related to the second excerpt, but the changing patterns in weather, particularly extreme weather, are changing the economics of agriculture all over the world.  And climate change will not be an economic benefit for farmers that are forced out of farming due to the instability of the weather, causing their marginally profitable operations to become unprofitable.  That will affect all of us, with higher prices and reduced availability. 

So, even if you don't drink wine, the changes and adaptations of the wine industry may be a harbinger of similar things to come for many other consumables.

And I didn't even say anything here about bees.