Wine and climate change

I’ve just returned from a two-week vacation in England and Wales. The picture shows one of the first places that my wife and I visited: Stokesay Castle, which, according to its official website , “is quite simply the finest and best preserved fortified medieval manor house in England.”

I took the picture using my mobile phone. You can probably tell what that late September day was like: cool and damp. By the end of the vacation, the weather over England and Wales had changed significantly—for the better. The last full day, Saturday, 1 October, was the hottest October day ever recorded in Britain. In Gravesend, a town on the Thames Estuary, the temperature reached 29.9 °C (85.8 °F).

The unusually warm weather brought to mind a news story I’d read recently on the BBC’s website. Writing for the website’s Food and Drink department, Suemedha Sood reported on evidence that climate change is affecting the world’s wine-growing regions.

Winemakers grow grape varieties that suit the local soil and climate, what the French call the terroir. Through centuries of trial and error, wine makers in Italy’s Piedmont region, for example, have discovered where best to cultivate Nebbiolo grapes for Barolo wine, one of my favorites. In making their decisions about what to plant and where, winemakers in the New World make use of both Europe’s accumulated knowledge and the research conducted by enologists and viniculturalists.

But however you match grape to terroir, the best wines come from narrowly defined regions. And when the climate changes, those regions change too. In her BBC story, Sood mentioned research that warned of a shift in the location and size of America’s premium wine-producing regions.

Climate change has already affected winemaking in Britain. When William Shakespeare wrote Henry V around 1599, Europe had already spent 50 years in a period of lower-than-normal temperatures known as the Little Ice Age. To Shakespeare, the possibility that grapes might thrive in English soil must have seemed remote. One of the characters in Henry V, the French constable, contrasts the English and the French by comparing the climate and habitual beverages of their native lands:

Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,

On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale,

Killing their fruit with frowns? Can sodden water,

A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley-broth,

Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?

And shall our quick blood, spirited with wine,

Seem frosty? O, for honour of our land,

Let us not hang like roping icicles

Upon our houses’ thatch, whiles a more frosty people

Sweat drops of gallant youth in our rich fields!

Poor we may call them in their native lords.

Whether climate change will continue to benefit winemaking in Britain isn’t clear. If its only effect were higher temperatures, the answer is likely to be yes. Britain lies just within the northern limit of viniculture in Europe. Higher temperatures would extend both the growing area of wine-worthy grapes and their variety.

But climate change could also bring more rain. A climate foggy and dull, even one that’s warm not raw, is not good for fine wine.