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. (Read about the Bordeaux bubble.)
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 Pened?s, 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." (Read: "In Bordeaux, Harvest Time Means Infrared Spy Satellites.)
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. (See "The Fight to Save Wine from Extreme Weather.")
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.
See reviews of 50 American wines.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
In Spain, where the average temperature has already increased by 1 degree C since the 1880s, farmers have moved up their harvests of some varieties of grapes as many as 25 days over the past 25 years, says Fernando Zamora, an oenologist at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. As part of Cenit Dem?ter, a $36 million effort by 25 Spanish wine companies, Zamora has been studying the impact of warming weather on the quality of wine and ways to counterbalance it in the winery. In some cases, unbalanced ripening has made sparkling wines flatter, reduced tannins in red wines or cut the acidity in the bottle, leaving the final product vulnerable to infestations of flavor-ruining bacteria or yeast. "The wines have become more fragile on the microbiological level," says Zamora.
Meanwhile, others are exploring what can be done in the fields: altering the way the vines are trellised to provide the fruit with more shade, rotating their orientation in relation to the sun, piping in irrigation. Once those relatively simple options are exhausted, says Jos? Miguel Zapater, director of the Spanish government's Institute of the Science of Vines and Wines, growers will have to consider replanting. For decades, when the weather was colder, growers bred grape varieties to ripen faster and produce higher-alcohol wines. "Now maybe we have to go back and select for the opposite direction," says Zapater. (Read about China's wine bubble.)
As temperatures rise further, winemakers may find that they will need to change the types of wine they produce. For instance, those growing pinot noir, a grape that does well in cooler climes, might decide to start producing zinfandel instead. In some cases, growers will be able to develop new varieties of grapes, like the ruby cabernet, a hybrid grape bred for the warmer regions of California that crossed the fruity flavors of cabernet sauvignon with the heat resistance of the carignan. And finally, when all else fails, they will have to follow Torres and head to higher ground.
Next year, Torres will turn 70, the age at which he has said he will begin to relinquish control to the fifth generation of his winegrowing family. For now, he says, he plans to stay on as president, handing over responsibility the day-to-day production to a manager but remaining the public face of the company. The role of his two children who work for the firm (in addition to Mireia, who oversees two of the family's vineyards, Torres has a son, also named Miguel, who runs operations in Chile; his other daughter is a doctor) will be determined by the company's board.
When asked what his grandchildren - the potential sixth generation in the family business - would be presiding over in several decades' time, Torres is cautiously optimistic. But the picture he paints is nonetheless dramatic. One projection by the Spanish government predicts a rise of another 4 degrees C by the end of the century if the world doesn't band together to cut emissions. By way of comparison, the difference in average temperature between today's climate and that of the last ice age is roughly 6 degrees C. "For the future, at least for the next 20 years, the key work will be to delay maturation," Torres says. The vineyards, now rain fed, will almost certainly have to depend on irrigation from water gathered in the small rain reservoirs he has begun building. Temperatures are likely to rise to the point that the tempranillo grape, a current mainstay of the company's production, would struggle to grow. So his grandchildren will probably have to replant with other varieties. And of course, the company will continue its move up the slopes. (See "California's Bargain Wine Boom.")
Torres is doing what he can to halt the rising mercury. He can cope, provided that the warming is limited. "If you give me 2 degrees, tell me where and I'll sign," says Torres. "More than that, though, and it looks like a really big problem." In the past few years, he has installed solar panels on the roof of a new winery, invested in a wind park and committed his company to cut the carbon footprint of his wine 30% per bottle by 2020. As part of the Cenit Dem?ter project, his company is working on a way to capture the carbon dioxide the grapes give off during fermentation and use it to grow algae, which could then be burned for fuel.
This summer, Torres, who drives a silver Prius, began trying to spread his efforts beyond the confines of his firm. At a conference in Barcelona in June, he introduced a list of commitments including emissions cuts and water conservation and asked other Spanish winemakers to sign onto them. The idea, he says, would be to provide the list to large purchasers like Tesco in the U.K. and buyers for the government monopoly in Canada. "The big buyers in the world will know that in Spain, it's these companies that are moving on the issue," says Torres. Next year, he plans to take the effort to other parts of Europe and then perhaps to the U.S. It's another investment in the New World that he hopes will one day bear fruit.
See reviews of 50 American wines.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
View this article on Time.com
Most Popular on Time.com:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.