A year of fire and ice has set the stage for sweeping changes across the wine industry, Kathleen Willcox reports on how producers are adjusting.
Talk to 100 different wine growers, and you’ll find 100 different approaches to combating climate change. Many in the wine industry are concerned about which grapes they should grow—and where.
Consistently higher temperatures threaten up to 85% of the world’s current winegrowing areas, scientists warn in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, unless growers diversify and expand what and where they grow.
Others focus on the not-insubstantial carbon output the growing and production of wine requires. Between electric tractors, ever-lighter glass bottles, renewable energy and fewer chemical inputs, the focus is on reducing current and future harm.
But as 2023 has shown us again and again—Canadian wildfires that engulfed 35 million acres by late August, the most deadly wildfires in more than a century in the U.S. forcing residents of Hawaii to jump from cliffs into the sea, an ice storm in Texas that paralyzed the state for more than three days, the highest global temperatures ever on record in July—climate change is threatening and transforming almost every element of life and business as we know it.
