Interesting Article. The animated charts are especially illuminating.
This article is embarrassingly bad.
Buzzfeed?
Buzzfeed - because simon brown’s posts make too much sense for you.
actually, its a pretty solid article.
No, it’s not. It has the trappings of a solid article but its crap. It is extremely annoying that there is no good reporting on the impact of climate change on wine production.
What gets me is they talk about how it is ruining Bordeaux, causing it to have three or four great vintages out of ten, instead of one out of ten! Like that’s bad?
The predictions made in the story are based upon global temperatures increasing according to the models. However, The models have consistently overestimated the warming that has occurred which is now outside the confidence intervals (on the cooler side) with global temps steady for about the last 18 years.
Enjoy how right you are for another month. 2014 is on track to be the hottest year ever.
David, without explaining why it’s crap, your post seems needlessly argumentative and unsubstantiated. I’m not saying you are wrong, just that you haven’t given us a reason to agree with you.
There’s honestly not much to it. Just repeating the same thing over and over.
I have no doubt that climate change is affecting wine regions, but the article didn’t to anything to make me believe in any imminent demise.
I think a fun place to consider this question is the USDA plant hardiness zone maps, which have been around for nearly a century and had non-controversially been showing a northward migration of planting zones (i.e. warmer, less freezing) and quietly being useful until whoever the first douche was who came along and made this somehow a liberal/conservative argument.
If one were so motivated, it isn’t hard to Google the maps from various decades past.
They are either unambiguously demonstrative of warming, or were secretly plotted and poorly conceived for the first 60-80 years of their existence.
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Anton, this is an excellent point because it highlights perhaps the most profound impact that our influence on the Earth’s climate will have on us: changing habitat ranges for plants and animals. This is occurring more quickly then has ever been seen on the geologic timescale - except for catastrophic events like meteor impacts or massive volcanic eruptions - and will put pressure on all life on Earth but especially on humans given our dependance upon a VERY narrow genetic range of plants and animals.
Since we seem unable and or unwilling to stop or even slow down slightly, we must prepare for the inevitable.
“Hello, Canada? Can we move our breadbasket in with you guys, eh?”
Get over it. Eventually, California and Italian wines will taste like Australian wines. Soon after that, so will Oregon, Washington and the rest of Europe. And by the way Ice Wine from Oslo and Fairbanks will come into their own.
As a smart individual pointed out to me a little while back, temperatures are only part of the equation and Fairbanks might not get enough sunlight to make the wine you want.
You mean the sun won’t shine all day and night like did it when I lived there. (freezing my arse off)?
Randy;
Loring is already making his CA and OR wines taste like Aussie wines! 
Nothing in the rule books says that grapes have to hang to a near raisin state. That’s a very new (20 year) take on American winemaking out of the CA-Davis School of winemaking. If the vintners dialed back ripeness a bit, it would long delay the production of those massive jammy wines.
Even though the sun is up all day, it’s pretty low on the horizon. So not a lot of direct solar radiation.
Interesting to think about. Fairbanks is pretty far north and sure the sun is low. Today in Norway you can grow strawberries in open fields even farther north, just below the arctic circle. They ripen slowly, but because of that and the lower temperatures and long days they are also super delicious. The problem with grapes even if temperatures should rise considerably is they need much more time and by September or October the sun would be even lower and days getting shorter rapidly. More than Oslo the fjords to the west, south of Bergen in an area today known for apples and cherries might be interesting in the future. Not likely in my time and there too low sun in autumn would be a problem.
Keep in mind Norwegian climate is way milder than Alaskan at similar latitudes because of the Gulf stream bringing relatively warm water up along the Norwegian coastline. Impossible to predict how ocean currents would be influenced by severe climate change, but good reason to fear they might change.
Very interesting points. If the ripening slows down and the grapes have to hang until late-Oct/early-Nov. Then you wind up with very long days and very low sun. Of course, Fairbanks is at the extreme… more realistic is to talk about British Columbia and southern England. I’m guessing the guys making wine there today might have some ideas, although it’s anyone’s guess what will happen once things get going.
So much that is impossible to predict. Looking just at the west coast of the US from a winemaking perspective, will Oregon and Washington get warmer, or will they also get less precipitation and become fully California-like? No way to know and there are so many variables.