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Wine has been around for ages. If we’re to look at what archaeologists say (and we should), we’ve been making wine since over 8,000 years ago. So of course, we’ve gotten quite good at it. But it’s not all craftsmanship, talent, and ingenuity combined with a particularly well developed taste that makes a wine good.
A very important part of wine making, if not the most important, are of course, the grapes. If the vineyard produces god grapes, then expert winemakers can take it from there, but the role of the vines is ultimate. And it turns out that wine making may be one of the only things to benefit from global warming.
Vineyards will prosper
According to a study from Harvard and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, French wine will prosper thanks to global warming. How can that be, you ask? Well, it appears that the overall increased year-round heat is helping speed up each individual harvest, making for quicker batches and more highly rated wines.
Based primarily around Burgundy and Bordeaux winemakers, the study used data from both NASA and wineries to determine that global warming has led to an increased rate in both productions and frequency of batches, as possibly even in the over taste of the wine. But this last part is still disputed.
Musical alcoholic chairs
Previous studies showed that if we go into uncharted territory, the rules might stop applying. It was a known fact that earlier harvests lead to better wines. However, like it happened in 2003 with one of France’s earliest harvests on record, the resulting wine was overwhelmingly… average.
This means that because of the earlier and earlier harvests, the previously taken for granted rules might soon change, if they haven’t already. This might put other winemakers from higher latitudes and altitudes at an advantage over France’s potentially worsening wine. It would basically be a game of alcoholic musical chairs among the world’s biggest vineyard.
The future of winemaking
But it’s still too early to tell how the above studies will hold up. Since the planet has never seen such immense levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere, all the data researchers have to go on is mostly either speculation or records from the past few decades.
One fact is clear, though; and it’s starting to be more obvious to our fellow countrymen as well – climate change is something we’re responsible for, and it brings with it unforeseeable circumstance. The odd one might be for the best, but mostly no good can come from our continuous pollution of our floating space rock.
Image source: Wikimedia
