Global warming :
the vine growers are worried
Delphine Chayet
13 / 08 / 2009 | Updated: 09: 17 | Add to my selection
According to these professionals, the taste of wine has already changed and the increase in temperatures will change the traditional grape varieties.
They are fifty winemakers, chefs, oenologists or sommeliers and, as such, ardent defenders of French terroirs. Their signatures appear at the bottom of a "solemn appeal" to the President of the Republic and the Minister of the Environment, a few months from the Copenhagen conference on climate. "Global warming is making vines more and more vulnerable," they write in this forum of the World. As flagships of our cultural heritage, French wines, elegant and refined, are today in danger. "
According to these professionals, the taste of wine has already begun to change. Harvest dates have been steadily advanced over the last 30 years, and the sun is charging the grapes with sugar. "Warming gives wines more spicy and rich, with higher alcohol content," says sommelier Franck Thomas. They are wines that are less digestible, less fine and less pleasant to drink on a daily basis. "As temperatures rise, this phenomenon is accentuated. In the long term, the French wine list will be profoundly modified. Controlled appellations of origin will be upset.
Vineyards in Brittany
"In forty or fifty years, the pinot noir or the Riesling as they are made today in Burgundy and Alsace will for example have disappeared," predicts Franck Thomas. By that date, new wine regions could be created in Brittany and Normandy, but also in England. "If nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gases, the vines will move 1 000 km beyond their traditional limits by the end of the century," warns Anaïz Parfait, Greenpeace. According to Jean-Pierre Chabin, a geographer at the University of Burgundy, "we can think that there will be vineyards in southern Sweden and Scotland".
But for Jean-Philippe Bret, producer at Domaine de la Soufrandière, in southern Burgundy, "what makes the specificity of a local wine is not only the climate, but also soils, an exhibition and a know how. Because this conjunction is impossible to find elsewhere, we will never make Burgundy elsewhere than in Burgundy.
It is to avoid this scenario that chef Marc Veyrat, sommelier Antoine Petrus and the Zind Humbrecht estates in Alsace and Selosse en Champagne have joined their names. All hope for the signing in Copenhagen of an "ambitious agreement", "committing industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020".
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