Climate Change is Doing Something Horrifying to Your Wine

How good your wine tastes depends on a number of factors. One of them is the climate in which the grapes were grown.

Looking at grape harvests over the last 500 years, researchers have been able to delve into how weather is affecting what's ending up in your glass.

It turns out that the wine you're drinking now may just be the best you'll ever drink, because as climate change alters weather patterns the quality is expected to decline.

Up until now, climate has been making it taste better. Warmer temperatures that traditionally delay rain and are followed by drought pushes forward grape maturation, meaning that they are harvested earlier in the year. This, in general, leads to a better quality and thus nicer tasting wine. By looking back at the time of harvest from regions in France and Switzerland, which have kept records from 1600 to 2007, the researchers were able to see that on average, the grape harvest is now two weeks earlier.

“There are two big points in this paper, the first is that harvest dates are getting much earlier, and all the evidence points to it being linked to climate change,” explains Elizabeth Wolkovich who coauthored the paper published in Nature Climate Change. “Especially since 1980, when we see a major turning point for temperatures in the northern hemisphere, we see harvest dates across France getting earlier and earlier.” This has driven a significant increase in the quality, meaning that current batches are pretty good.

But now it's getting worrying. In the past the drought acting as a predictor of an early harvest and better wine but that is just now not the case. With climate change, temps are getting warmer in general so they're now not necessarily followed by a dry period and can now be shadowed instead by rain that has the reverse effect – decreasing a vintage's quality.

"...we have several data points that tell us there is a threshold we will probably cross in the future where higher temperatures will not produce higher quality.” Says Wolkovich. 

Uhhh ohhhh. NOT THE WINNNNE.

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