AUTHOR: Dave McIntyre TITLE: Global Warming - Friend or Foe? DATE: 2/17/2008 04:54:00 PM ----- BODY:

Global warming may still be a controversial theory in politics and science, but winemakers are believers. Rising temperatures and changing climates are being credited – at least in part – with improvements in wine quality in unusual or new regions, while vintners in more established regions are worried that Mother Nature will pass them by. Virginia has had four strong vintages in a row, unprecedented in the Old Dominion’s 400 years of winemaking (or at least, in the 30 years they’ve been really serious about it). The 2003 vintage looms as global warming’s flip side – record rainfalls, including a hurricane at harvest time that left many wines dilute. California’s grape sugars – and alcohol content in the wine – have been rising slightly but perceptibly in recent vintages. Vineyard practices contribute to this trend, as do market forces, but temperatures remain a factor. "I like global warming,” Bruno Eynard, winemaker at Chateau Lagrange in St. Julien, told me last year, giving climate change partial credit at least for a string of good harvests this decade. “But I want it to stop now,” he said, “or I’ll be making Bordeaux in England!” Last week, Dr. Richard Smart, the famed Australian viticulturist, raised the possibility that our favorite wines may already have been irreparably altered by global warming. "I would ask anyone with a cellar full of known value wines, have you thought about the fact that in Bordeaux, we may have already seen the best vintages of Cabernet Sauvignon?" Smart said at the 2008 Climate Change and Wine Conference in Barcelona, Spain. According to Decanter.com, Smart said many famous wine regions may soon be unsuitable for their most noted grape varieties. He predicted that Argentina and Chile will be “lucky” because the preponderance of oceans in the Southern Hemisphere will moderate the changes. And China’s cold, barren north may be the Napa Valley of the future. At least then, we’d know what wine to drink with Chinese food.

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