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Keeping cool Vineyard manager Xavier Admella Baulies checks on grapevines in the Pyrenees
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When the Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres was a young man, his father sent him to Chile. It was 1979, and the South American country was years away from being recognized for the quality of its wine. But the elder Torres was thinking about the future. He had not forgotten the chaos of the Spanish Civil War, when he twice faced death and the family winery was seized by one side, then bombed by the other. Torres' father reasoned that a landholding in the New World that was climatically suitable for growing wine would hedge against instability at home.
Spain never did slide back into civil war, but the investment in Chile turned out to be valuable nonetheless. The vast bulk of the family's wine production remains in Spain, but its vineyards in South America are producing high-quality vintages that, along with the company's properties at home and in California, make the Bodegas Torres wine company one of the major labels in the industry. Now 69 years old, Miguel Torres oversees sales of more than 42 million bottles a year in more than 140 countries.
Today, Torres is preparing once again for an uncertain future, not because of war but because of global warming, which is threatening his industry. This time, the investment isn't across the ocean. It's up the hill — a two-hour drive from the company's headquarters in Vilafranca del Penedès, near Barcelona, into the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, on a high bluff brushed with pines and peppered with wild rosemary and thyme, swatches of ripening vineyards take advantage of the cool mountain air to produce grapes that would wilt under the Mediterranean heat of the lowlands. "We're buying land even higher, in areas that are still too cold to plant," says Torres.
It's a sort of climate insurance. There are few products as vulnerable to global warming as fine wine. Vintners can do a lot to change the taste and feel of their product in the winery, but at the most elemental level, great wines require great grapes. Most winegrowers will tell you that the taste and quality of the fruit is determined by three primary factors: the variety of the vine (merlot, cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir and so on), the soil in which it's planted and the weather when the berries are growing. There's a reason that grapes are the only crop for which consumers want to know the year of the harvest. "We really do depend on the climate," says Torres' daughter Mireia, who leads the company's research on the impact of climate change. "If you don't have a good climate, you can't achieve a good maturity of the grapes. And then you can't produce good wines. And then you can't produce a profit. And then you can't survive."
The challenge for winegrowers is that the different aspects of a wine grape don't necessarily mature at the same rate. When the weather is warmer, the fruit becomes sweeter earlier in the year. But the seeds and skins, which ultimately give the wine its flavor, texture and color, need time to develop. The art of winegrowing is, at its essence, making sure the various processes peak at the same moment. If the climate is too cold, the grape won't have ripened completely by the time the threat of autumn weather forces the farmer into the fields. When it's hot, the problem is reversed: the grapes will need to be plucked early, heavy with sugar, with their flavor elements still sharp, bitter and undeveloped.
Indeed, the warming of the world has already changed the taste of many wines, says Greg Jones, a climatologist at Southern Oregon University and the son of a winemaker. When Jones compared average temperatures around the world with vintage evaluations by the auction house Sotheby's, he discovered that not only had the temperatures climbed in nearly every place he examined but the ratings had also risen with them.
Global warming in the last half of the 20th century actually made wine taste better. The trouble began when Jones looked at what his data told him about the best temperatures for growing wine. In the 1950s, it turned out, most parts of the world had been a little bit too cold for growing the types of grapes planted there. By the 1990s, however, temperatures in most places had reached the perfect level. As the warming continues, Jones realized, winemakers will find it increasingly difficult to produce a decent bottle of wine.
In order to glimpse what the future may look like, the Torres company maintains two climate-controlled greenhouses in a nursery on one of its vineyards. In one, temperatures are kept at the historic average. In the other, the air is made an average of 3 degrees C hotter, a temperature rise that could easily occur by the end of the century. In addition, half the vines in each greenhouse are given only half the usual amount of water to simulate the drop in rainfall that's expected to hit the region. On a recent visit, I saw the difference between the present and what can be expected in the future. In the control plot, a few grapes were just beginning to change color. In the other, they were a rich, rusty purple, ripening ahead of their time. The vines on the regimented water supply were thinner and less leafy than their properly irrigated counterparts.
