Genießen Sie Ihren Lieblingswein, bevor der Klimawandel ihn zerstört

By Matt Simon:

Up to 70 percent of today’s wine regions could be at substantial risk of losing suitability for production if the world warms more than 2 degrees Celsius, a new paper finds. (That’s the Paris Agreement’s absolute limit for warming above preindustrial temperatures.) Due to ever-fiercer droughts and heat waves, 90 percent of the traditional coastal and lowland wine growing regions of Spain, Italy, Greece, and southern California could be at existential risk by the end of the century. Meanwhile, rising temperatures are opening up new regions to growing, like the southern United Kingdom, as wine production generally shifts to higher latitudes and altitudes, where it’s cooler.

“It doesn’t mean that the wine-growing disappears—and that’s an important caveat—but it means that it can get a lot more challenging,” says viticulturist Greg Gambetta of Bordeaux Sciences Agro and the Institute of Science of Vine and Wine, lead author of the review paper, publishing today in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. “There’s actually a lot of room for adaptation for wine growers—if the warming is limited. This is true for most regions.”

To help winemakers adapt, scientists are experimenting with different tricks to cool the plants. Cover crops growing under the grapes help cool the fruit, for instance. “If you have bare soils on your vineyard floor, you get a lot of re-radiation—your soils heat up a lot and then reflect heat back into the canopy,” says Forrestel. “I think we’re just beginning to understand the impacts of some of these truly extreme events because they’re more recent, and becoming more frequent.”

Read the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/enjoy-your-favorite-wine-before-climate-change-destroys-it/