Scorched, Parched and Now Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country
If any nook of American agriculture has the means and incentive to outwit the climate crisis, it is Napa Valley. But so far, vineyards here show the limits of adapting to a warming planet.
It seems there are two groups most affected, those that must irrigate regularly, and those that have vineyards planted in the mountains. And there is likely significant overlap in those groups.
Certainly the situation is dire for many vintners. On the other hand, Iād expect the valley floor, which is closer to ground water and further from unbroken wildfire ecosystem, is somewhat better positioned. As the valley heats up, prime vineyards will shift towards the south where there is stronger bay influence to moderate temperatures. Similar phenomena are seen in Europe where some south-facing vineyards are no longer considered the best, as they not only get ripe yearly, but are often overripe.
Certainly the siren call of $200 Cabs will be hard to escape. That is probably the biggest challenge. The logical thing to do is to look to Southern Italy and find varieties that can be dry farmed and maintain acid in the heat. But Napa Aglianico would likely sell for 5x-10x less than Napa Cab. Would the farming costs really be 5x to 10x less? No. So as long as Napa is focused on being a luxury brand, it will be trapped into forcing a square peg (Cab) into a round hole (hot, arid climate).
Read the article this morning. It brings to mind a fairly recent podcast/interview with a pretty famous and infamous winemaker who didnāt understand what all the fuss was about climate change (paraphrasing: āa few degrees ā¦ āvines are so resilientā āwe havenāt scratched the surface in terms of vineyard management to adapt to higher temperatures; will not be a problemā). The fires came right up to his vineyard last year.
So many of us were just not connecting the dots between the extremes, the fires/smoke, water supply (āwe are dry farmedā ā¦ well except when planting new vinesā¦), etc. I feel like Iāve been on top of climate change issues and science, but I didnāt expect the type of extreme heat event that we experienced a few weeks ago in the PAC NW until mid-Century. Scary stuff to hear climate scientists say that their models simulated this heat event as a one in a million event; and therefore the models are probably not correct and they admitted to needing to rethink/restudy how extreme heat events occur and behave.
(There is a similar thread titled āuninsurableā and I posted this) Read the article this morning. It brings to mind a fairly recent podcast/interview with a pretty famous and infamous winemaker who didnāt understand what all the fuss was about climate change (paraphrasing: āa few degrees ā¦ āvines are so resilientā āwe havenāt scratched the surface in terms of vineyard management to adapt to higher temperatures; will not be a problemā). The fires came right up to his vineyard last year.
So many of us were just not connecting the dots between the extremes, the fires/smoke, water supply (āwe are dry farmedā ā¦ well except when planting new vinesā¦), etc. I feel like Iāve been on top of climate change issues and science, but I didnāt expect the type of extreme heat event that we experienced a few weeks ago in the PAC NW until mid-Century. Scary stuff to hear climate scientists say that their models simulated this heat event as a one in a million event; and therefore the models are probably not correct and they admitted to needing to rethink/restudy how extreme heat events occur and behave.
When I was working in sustainability, we were definitely using assumptions of this level of impacts further out ā¦ but here it is. I as at meetings with Canadian government folks in 2003 or so and they were already designing mitigation plans while US meetings were still just debating whether it would happen. Itās going to be mighty hard to adjust at this speed.
Problem is models are just models: they are attempts at explaining how things might work, but they are crude instruments. Failing forecasting by God (who knows all things and can see the future), us humans are pretty inept at forecasting turns of events that we simply have never lived through. There are a Lot of externalities and subtle effects that will be missed. Doesnāt mean we shouldnāt attempt to, though.
Right, itās widely complex. Just want to emphasize that climate modeling is broken down into many subsystem analyses and has come a long way from the early days before scientists had ready access to supercomputers. All the models are trained with an entire globeās worth of historical (100+ years) weather station data sets, thus the need for many weeks of computer time. The basic concept is to ensure that a model (at the very least) can correctly simulate the historic record and then also using the historical data, the simulations can be ādownsizedā to a local area/region. But yes, given all of this, they tend to be overly conservative in a way because they are not necessarily designed to project tipping points and most scientists will not train their models to overly emphasize rare, extreme anomalies.
Insurance which is unaffordable or unavailable affects not just wineries making $200 bottles of oak-slivered, ethanol-laced, purple-tinted, point-chasing fruit jam.
Look at this, or outside many of your front doors. Heck, my apartment insurance premiums are jumping yearly, and rightly so.