"There’s no permanence without climate resilience." You can apply this statement to all living things (and our entire built infrastructure as well). The human race is demonstrating that it is incapable of changing to slow or stop climate change. In America, we have a president and his base that refuse to even acknowledge that it is real. Therefore adapting and resilience are essential. I have confidence that California will be a world leader in developing innovative solutions to help us cope. Unfortunately, the State will be forced to fight the willfully ignorant republicans every step of the way.
I hate to say this, it may become impossible to grow the grapes in the Napa Valley due to climate change. I've watched a farm struggle to grow peaches here in Southern California. Peaches from that farm were once described to me by a friend as, "the best peaches he ever had." But with 5 to 6 years of drought and increasing temperatures I"m not sure you can get a consistently good peach any longer. And it is a struggle to farm in these conditions. And "struggle" translates as increased costs.
Last year we had a great season, weather wise, something that resembled Southern California of the 1980's. But still we had these late season, dry gusty winds. Nothing new, but worse than before. If I owned a farm I'd have a for sales sign on it and if I wished to keep farming I'd look at a place that might be a little more hospitable, climate wise, elsewhere. Where? I don't know, maybe Ohio, upstate New York. Your guess is as good as mine.
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Are Napa Valley wineries talking about using buses instead of personal vehicles for visits to wineries, restaurants and tasting rooms? This would both reduce the number of DUI arrests and reduce the carbon footprint of the wine industry. This is a carbon release that could be easily mitigated. I noticed that the issue of lack of housing for wine industry employees received minimal attention in article about how the wine industry says it is trying to reduce its carbon output. Much of the workforce commutes dozens of miles each day to work.
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@Mike When we discuss Climate Action in Napa, the 800 pound gorilla that nobody mentions is the 3.85 million tourists (2017 count) who drive up and down the valley each year. The carbon emitted from their cars, let alone the businesses that service these tourists, including the wineries, must be astonishing. No such talk about busing them that I've heard. Article didn't mention it either.
There are many positive aspects to farming organically, but we also must have an open discussion about the additional greenhouse gases that come from farming this way. Sprays have to happen more frequently which in turn means additional passes through the vineyard with the tractor, which of course means a greater amount of fuel used and emissions produced. Perhaps there’s a happy medium out there...electric tractor anyone?
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@Rebecca - look here - John Deere's trying it out for the tractor and then the implements the tractor tows. Should be a no-brainer with the current state of EV technologies - farmers won't need to have diesel fuel or pollutants and noise, and the implements will be electric-controlled, too, so less problems with hydraulics.
https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=139
https://electrek.co/2016/12/05/john-deere-electric-tractor-prototype/
And here's a blog entry about uses of robotics in agriculture, item #4 mentions precision spraying.
https://blog.robotiq.com/top-10-robotic-applications-in-the-agricultural-industry
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This has been an interesting series, and to one point raised in this installment, I've begun looking at organic/sustainable wines.
I'm also now aware of the bottle as an issue, it was surprising to find bottles are 1/4 of Jackson's emissions. So looking for lighter bottles (haven't looked at boxes yet).
Good luck to all wine growers success in rebalancing away from the alcohol-heavy product warming's bringing.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/wine-harvest-dates-earlier-climate-change/
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@b fagan I am from sweden and here we only sell alcohol in special stores (”Systembolaget”) the good thing with that is that the stores are able to inform the consumers about the WHOLE product (not only what is in the bottle, but also about the bottle). The people who works at Systembolaget are also well-informed about their stock, so you can always ask for advice and be particular with what you want to buy. Maybe a good thing for your country too if you do not already have stores with info about the whole product?
Have a nice day!
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So hopefully this means that irrigating vineyards with our most precious resource (to make another product which is 85% water) will stop. And that varieties and rootstocks which nature can not sustain in these conditions will be replaced by those which were the pre-cursors ?
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What effect are the wild fires going to have on the California's wine? Grape production, quality of the wine, wine already aging?
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@Bruce1253 most grapes were already harvested for this season, so very little impact. As for wine that is aging, if the cellars were not impacted by fire, no impact to those particular winemakers. There was a lot of wine lost in 2017. Those fires were earlier in the season and did impact harvest.
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@Bruce1253 - The plants aren't any different than us. We go to work outside on a hot day that we are not used to. We sleep, we recover. We do it the next day, we aren't so sprite. We do again and the next day we are exhausted, worn out and can hardly move. That's what happens to the plants, they barely survive and the flavor is gone, the harvest is diminished and the finished product isn't what it used to be.
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@Bruce1253 Wine that is already harvested is going to be fine unless the actual facility burns down. But smoke taint is a real threat and a lot of wine has been lost in the past handful of years.
Smoke particles seem into the fruit on the vine and translates to a very distinct and unpleasant ashtray-like flavor. How wineries deal with this is based on an individual level - do you harvest when the fruit is underripe just in case there's another big fire this year? Do you just take it on the chin and lose a bunch of your fruit? Or do you quietly ignore it and try to sell a flawed product anyway? I've seen all these things happen.