that are getting better or those that are getting worse?
You would think that some upper slope vineyards and other cooler vineyards that have good soil but where grapes have traditionally stuggled to get ripe would be helped by climate change. Warmer vineyards might be getting overripe. For example, I have heard speculation that climate change has not been good for Erbacher Marcobrun.
But, as much as we can say that climate change is changing the nature of the wines of a region altogether, I don’t know of much that I can say on a vineyard by vineyard basis. Any thoughts by those who know more than me (knowing more than me should not leave out too many people).
Intervintage variance is significantly larger than magnitude of the long term “climate change” trend ; so if this isn’t something you can discern when comparing warmer vintages to cooler, you wont be able to discern it from climate change. In addition, not every region is warming, and warming isn’t evenly distributed throughout the year; regional effects can swamp the global signal. For example, there’s at least some thinking that a warming arctic has caused cooler fall temperatures in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, even while winter temperatures continue to warm. Finally, vineyard quality is only partly about warmth, and also about sunlight, water table, soils, slope, etc.
So in sum, any effect would be small, should already be obvious from vintage-to-vintage variation, and would be complicated by other factors. Anyone giving you firm answers to what vineyards will be better (or wholly ascribing increased ripeness in their vineyard to anthropogenic climate change) is BSing.
Then chalk it up to something cyclical, but what has happened in Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Piemonte over the last, say, 20 years is unprecedented. These are regions that were lucky to produce 3 good or better vintages per decade in the last century. The Piemonte has had 1 less than good vintage per decade over the past 20 years. You can also chalk some of that up to technology and new vineyard and cellar management techniques, but weather is still the dominant factor…
I dunno about getting better/worse, as the winemakers’ hands obviously play a big part here as well… but the reputation of sites like the Erdener Prälat that were known for ripening in cool, weak vintages has declined with a lot more very ripe wines being produced from there.
Other higher altitude sites like Zeltinger Himmelreich that weren’t regarded as particularly great in the past seem to get a lot more attention now - then again, how much of that may be climate change, and how much might be due to the fact that it’s farmed by Johannes Selbach who IMO is one of the top growers/winemakers in Germany? (While, otoh, I’m struggling to think of any top growers who farm Prälat - Meulenhof’s version is very good, but I never enjoy it as much as I enjoy his Treppchen or Wehlener Sonnenuhr.)
That said, growers like Thomas Haag and Johannes Selbach have said a fair bit about how they’re looking to cooler sites with less exposure to produce lighter, elegant wines now - as the better regarded sites like Brauneberger Juffur Sonnenuhr or Zeltinger Sonnenuhr tend to produce ripe Spätlese+ wines, rather than more delicate Kabinetts/dry wines. Were you at the Rieslingfeier afternoon event by any chance where David Schildknecht and Thomas Haag talked at length about this?
On an aside re. Erbacher Marcobrunn, I think climate change is less of an issue there than the problem of less-than-great growers for that great site (as with many others in the Rheingau - Steinberger, Baiken, the Eltville vineyards, etc.)
Keep in mind that winemakers are essentially ignorant about climate change; my suspicious has always been that winemakers attribute to “climate change” stylistic changes that are more likely to be the result of changes in viticulture or vinification. It makes the changes sound natural and noninterventionist.
Also, regional climates have multidecadal cycles driven by longterm changes in atmospheric circulation and ocean circulation / sea surface temperature distribution. For example, Western Europe is hypersensitive to the mean NAO state, which some folks think has multidecadal patterns driven by ocean circulation and sea ice (other folks think the cause-effect relationship is the other way around). With such a high percentage of the great vineyards in the world concentrated in a very small area of western Europe that’s particularly sensitive to changes in Atlantic ocean / atmospheric circulation, European winemakers could be observing changes over 10, 20 year intervals far in excess of - and probably unrelated or only tenuously related to - global climate change.
While your principle is correct, it doesnt help to post a graph that shows the warmest (or near warmest) year occuring 15 years ago (in 1998). That graph only looks pretty because someone smoothed the trend. Warming has substantially slowed since 1998, but that’s not entirely unexpected in a complex climate system, even though it highlights that it is unlikely that Kabinetts suddenly became climatically impossible to make since 2001.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has a new report showing that the Earth has not warmed in the past 15 years. > The results have those who believe that carbon dioxide emissions pose significant threat to the planet scrambling to explain why their previous predictions have not occurred. Critics of human-caused-climate-change arguments are using the results to argue, in essence, “see, I told you so.”
Despite the fact that the IPCC’s previous predictions did not come to pass, the new report argues that human impact on the climate is “unequivocal” and, given enough time, its predictions will eventually come true.
Yes, and we who enjoy those wines made in W. Europe better hope that the Gulf Stream doesn’t bend away from Europe as we continue to decrease the pH (as CO2 is absorbed and creates carbonic acid) of the oceans and warm them, thus altering the thermohaline circulation currents, of which the Gulf Stream is just one example. Some ocean geophysicists posit that one outcome of continued global warming will be such an alteration of the Gulf Stream, resulting in a “mini-ice age” for Europe…
I hate to say it, but I think David is right. (Damn! - that takes all the fun out of WB.) There’s no disputing the good fortune in Europe in the last 20 years, but whether it is due to climate change is conjecture given the year-to-year variations historically and the disparate effects of global warming in different locales.
Is anyone else here old enough to remember the Time magazine cover in the 70s speculating that we were entering a new Ice Age?
My point isn’t to deny global warming; just to point out that it’s easy to read big trends into short term variations.
Um, if you actually read the report instead of that ridiculously biased source of “information”, you see that they do report warming during that period, and in each of the past 3 decades. I don’t know why there is any question at this point among logical adults.
Um Doug, if you actually read critically instead of reflexively resorting to knee-jerk reactions, you’d see that I said nothing about whether I agreed with the premise of global warming generally (I believe it exists). I posted “What time period are you talking about?” because there has been a statistically insignificant increase in temperature over the last 15 years, hence the necessity to understand the parameters of Howard’s original question. Given the foregoing, I don’t know why any “logical adult” would believe that the mention of the last three decades is responsive to my post.
This is just an anecdotal observation and, moreover, it is not the anecdotal observation of a scientist or even of an unbiased observer, but in a recent interview Katharina Prum noted that JJ Prum no longer has any bad vintages (in the sense that they cannot successfully grow and harvest a sufficiently ripe crop to produce tasty wine), rather at this point it is just that each vintage has a different character, but each is good in its own way. Historically, she relates, that was not the case.
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