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Global Warming Brings Better Wine
Makarand writes "According to this article in the SF Chronicle climatologists have a found a link
between the warming environment and wine quality.
They found that
most vintages improved as vineyards' temperatures rose over the past 50 years with the quality improvement more pronounced in the cooler wine-producing regions." I wonder how wine fared during the "Little Ice Age."
did they just take 50 years to learn how to make wine?
move along, nothing to
While global warming may be great for most wines, it's gonna be hell on ice wines. Those grapes need cold temperatures - they actuallly have to freeze on the vine. Too hot, no freeze, no really expensive wine.
now we can drink ourselves senseless with quality vino while ruining the planet for countless of millions of years in the future!
is it just me or is science getting more decadent every year. the supposed brightests minds humanity has, have nothing better to do than this?
So to summarise: climate change effects agriculture. This is news?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Did they take in account the extra CO2 present in the atmosphere? I'd say that this improves a little the taste as well.
reason defies logic
Please! Keep up with the news. The Global Warming Theory has been debunked by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.
I like the National Review's comparison of Michael Mann to ex-professor Michael Bellesiles, who was striped of his tenure because of historical fraud.
"The fundamental scientific pillars of the Kyoto Accord is based on flawed calculations, incorrect data and a biased selection of climate records."
The corrected graph of Earth's thermal history http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/no-hockey.gif
QUOTE: Steve McIntyre and University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick, obtained the original data used by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia to support the notion that the 20th-century temperature rise was unprecedented in the past millennium. A detailed audit revealed numerous errors in the data. After correcting these and updating the source records they showed that based on Mann's own methodologies, his original conclusion was flawed. Mann's original version resulted in the famous "hockey stick" graph that purported to show 900 years of relative temperature stability (the shaft of the hockey stick) followed by a sharp increase (the blade) in the 20th century (see graph). The corrected version of the last thousand years actually contradicts the view promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and removes the foundation for claims of 20th-century uniqueness.
To understand the significance of the McIntyre/McKitrick announcement, it is important to consider how our understanding of long-term climate history has evolved over the past decade. In its 1990 and 1995 "Assessment Reports", the IPCC clearly identified two major global climatic events in the past millennium, as confirmed by thousands of papers written by quaternary geologists during the past century -- a "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP) from about 800 to 1300 A.D. that was as much as two degrees Celsius warmer than today, and a far colder "Little Ice Age" (LIA) from about 1300 to 1900 A.D. The effects of these events were felt worldwide with convincing evidence of both the MWP and LIA found in Europe, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Peru and even in China, Japan and Australia. As part of our emergence from the LIA, scientists agreed there had been a gradual warming throughout the 20th century, although the reasons for this were hotly contested with increasing greenhouse gases (GHG) and changes in the output of the sun being leading contenders.
In recent years, however, the case for solar variations being the 20th century's major climate driver has become much stronger, much to the consternation of Kyoto supporters. After all, if long before human-induced GHG emission became significant, temperatures were considerably higher than today, there would be little reason to think today's temperatures were anything unnatural. This was especially true since long-term solar records indicated that both the MWP and LIA were closely correlated with changes in solar activity, and the output of the sun has indeed been increasing during the past century's 0.6C warming. Supporters of the GHG-induced warming hypothesis desperately needed a "smoking gun" to prop up the need for Kyoto.
This was conveniently supplied by Mann, Bradley and Hughes in their 1998 paper (referred to as "MBH98") in which they reduced the MWP and LIA to non-events outside Europe and unveiled their "hockey stick." The paper concluded, "Our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence."
Of course, Kyoto fans were delighted. Despite being at odds with most of the scientific literature, and the fact that the MBH98 study was only one of thousands of possible millennial temperature constructions, advocates of the GHG hypothesis of climate change started to promote Mann's results as the definitive global temperature history. Within a year, with little real
Unfortunately, this research, like most research on the Earth's atmosphere, has a sample size of one. Until we can create accurate simulation models and do valid in silico experiments, most of the work will suffer from an inability to distinguish between correlation vs. causation.
You can do some real science with controls and statistical sample sizes. If the researchers had controlled the environmental conditions on various identical plots of vines to provide higher/lower temperatures, higher/lower CO2, etc. then they might have a valid basis for relating global warming to improved wines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What the **** has global warming to do with a windows emulator?
-- Cheers!
I remember reading a story, or seeing in a movie, where an old farmer would start each day by spraying some aerosol can contents out the door in hopes of causing Global Warming, so that winters wouldn't be so bad in his northern US homestead. What was that movie or book?
I though it might be a Simpsons reference (isn't everything?), but the closest I could come was when Global Warming brought good weather to the Costington's Christmas Parade.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Why, they made a little ice wine, of course!
The heat wave disaster in France this year is supposed to be good for the French wines made this year...
In our concern over global warming I think real costs Vs benefit analysis has been missing. Any global shift in the temperature is going to have both its good points and bad. In some places a global rise in temperature will without a doubt be damning. In other places though I imagine it would be welcomed.
Natural or not, before we get too worked up over the idea of global warming I think a better overall look at what the befits might be should be weighed. It very well could be that if we put enough effort into it, we could reverse the global trend, regardless if it is man made or not. Humans are pretty resourceful and if pushed could probably come up with ways to shift the climate in any direction the want. The issue is that any shift costs money.
How should it be decided if the overall benefits and problems are worth the cost to either stop or not stop global warming? How should it be decided if one region should be denied something that would benefit them to help a region that would be hurt? Do you just figure out which direction is the most costly? Do you declare that the current world climate is the most fair climate?
Right now we are simply acting on reflex. Things are changing and we are simply jumping to stop it. There has not been a real coherent discussion to my knowledge over whether or not perhaps a warmer earth is a good thing in the long run, it has just been an argument between industry and environmentalist, with industry automatically the side that controlling the climate is expensive, and environmentalist fighting to keep the climate from ever changing. No one is really considering the overall costs and benefits.
I suppose the answer is that right now we can't possibly begin to decide the real costs and real benefits. We are talking about a globe wide event, and with any globe wide event the variables are simply beyond our ability to even begin to tabulate. We can't even agree on what the cause is, much less develop an agreeable model over what the climate is doing so that costs and benefits can even begin to be considered. Right now it seems like everyone is just banking of 'faith'. You either have faith that things can go on as they are and in the end we will either have the power to deal with the consequences, or you have faith that the way things are now are the better then what they are moving towards and that the change will turn out to be bad and beyond our control.
In my opinion, both sides are just piss shots in the dark. Enough of my random musing.
But regions with warmer climates, such as Italy's famed Chianti region, could see grapes ripen too quickly under even warmer temperatures. Grapes that ripen too quickly on the vine generally have higher sugar content, which produces more alcoholic wine with less acidity and balance.
Please, tell me we're not going to lose good Chianti! It's easily my favorite variety of wine, and to have the quality decrease will be a real disappointment. I'd rather keep good Chianti around then have dozens more vineyards turning out yet more Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvingon for $9.95 supermarket bottles. Or worse yet - more of that awful White Zinfandel stuff. It's like if Kool-Aid was made into wine.
I have to wonder if their data was controlled for changes in wine producing methods and soil managment and other differences besides climate. It's not like this was a controlled experiment or anything.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
You mean I can not feel bad about driving my Hummer H2 around all the time and doing constant little errands in it and leaving it running in the driveway for hours on end and not feel bad about all that garbage it's belching out of the tailpipe? Sweet.
SilverOak.com has some great wine making videos. Silver Oak is my favorite wine, but it's way too expensive in most cases.
Readers interested in the correlation between wine and global warming may also be interested in the way in which wine makers prevent frost on the grapes during the colder months - there is a video there on that site that describes the process. They actually just spray the vineyard down with sprinklers, preventing the formation of frost and ice. Can't link to that video directly.
Overall the videos contained on that site are very interesting. You'll learn a lot about wine making if you have time to watch a few. QuickTime required.
I live in one of the places of the world where excellent quality wine is produced: Catalonia (Spain). This is north of Spain, south of France.
Priorat Wines are made here, and many other very good wines.
This has been and extremely warm summer and some country people started telling this harvest was going to be one of the best since 100 years. This is a false asumption due to the fact that grapes mature sooner and got many sugar. Sugar is the key to develop alcohol.
So you got it, lots of sugar, lots of alcohol, better wine. Wrong. The harvest has been done in a hurry because the grapes got so matured that they
started get rotten in the wine. There has been little time for the grape to develop.
In short : you could get grapes with more sugar ( so wine with more alcohol ), but the quality of this grape is worse, and the harvest is short.
It's not as if global warming is the only thing that's been going on in the last 50 years. There's been tons of research into new cultural methods for growing grapes, not to mention new grape varieties and new winemaking techniques. This progress has been especially pronounced in what would normally have been thought of as rather marginal sites, particularly those too cold to do well under standard viticultural practices. Most of the work that's been done on trellis designs has been done in that time period...that alone could probably account for most of the difference in quality.
One might as well say that the creation of the New York Mets brought on better wine quality. Or the Allied victory in WWII, or the election of Dwight Eisenhower as President, or the birth of my father. All those things happened about 50 years ago, and wine quality has improved since.