ShareThisBy STEPHANIE NOLEN
Toronto Globe and Mail
Friday, August 03, 2007
They sat, 40 men, hunched and intent around a long table, a row of glasses in front of them, evening light glinting off the dark green of bottles. They poured, they swirled, they sniffed, they spat and they searched for clues: Had the merlot lost its silkiness? Had the chardonnay gone green?
The gathering, held not long ago, was a technical tasting for the Cape Winemakers Guild, the elite organization of South African vintners. They met at Hidden Valley, a small farm on a hillside here in some of the world's best wine land.
They were searching not for the influence of a new vine that darkened a Pinotage or a barrel fermentation that bolstered a chenin blanc, but for the ephemeral yet indisputable difference climate change is making to South Africa's wines.
"You could taste it," said Jeremy Walker, who organized the gathering.
"The sauvignon blancs from the lower-lying, warmer farms are bigger, riper and less elegant," Walker said. The warmer merlots, on the other hand, were more astringent; the higher they were grown, the more subtle and soft their fruitiness.
Before they tasted, the winemakers had a lecture from Peter Johnston, a climatologist at the University of Cape Town who specializes in talking to farmers about what global warming means for them. Johnston said, in short, that South Africa, with the rest of the world, is getting warmer. And the rainfall patterns have gone wonky.
And while the grapevine, which originated in the desert, is a hardy plant, these changes -- even small variations in the amount of rain or when it falls -- create dramatic differences in the fruit it grows. For a product such as wine, whose consumers are legendarily discerning, this is crucial.
Climate change is having an effect on vineyards all over the world, of course, not just those around Stellenbosch. Climatologists at the University of Oregon say their models show the amount of U.S. land suitable for growing wine grapes could be reduced by as much as 81 percent by the end of the century if current trends continue. Australia's wine industry is in crisis, plagued by brutal drought, and the growing season too hot in recent years for many varieties to be harvested.
Climate change has meant good things for other wine-growing areas. English farmers are planting Champagne vines, and Austria's red wines, oenophiles say, are much improved by the hotter growing seasons of the past few years. British Columbia's climate is getting better and better for wine growing, and the warming is good for Nova Scotia's nascent industry, too.
But not for South Africa: It's getting too hot, and too wet (at the wrong times) in the key wine-growing region, and the flagship but fragile sauvignon blanc has been the first, but not the last, to suffer.
It's a harsh blow, first, because after years of sanctions in the apartheid era, the country has gradually been winning more market share for its wines (just under 3 percent globally, last year.) and its wines have garnered more critical acclaim as well.
And wine-making and related industries (from glass-making through to B&Bs) employs an estimated 1 million people in a country with a 45-percent unemployment rate. South Africa literally cannot afford to see this industry wilt.
Grapevines can cope with a couple of very hot days in summer, but if the temperature goes much above 35 degrees, then photosynthesis stops and the grapes don't ripen. And grapes grown at consistently higher temperatures have more sugar and thus more alcohol when fermented.
"There are fewer frontal systems, fewer rainy days and winter is starting later," Johnston told the winemakers who gathered for his lecture. "The South African summer typically produces two days so hot that grapevines wilt, but the last few years have seen 10. How many can you stand?"
A few of the winemakers dismissed Johnston's temperature charts, saying the recent years of weird weather are simply an aberration of the kind that comes along once every century or so. But most, Walker said, felt sure they needed to take action.
Already, he has heard reports of farmers buying land that is further up the hillsides, or closer to the coast, or aligned to get the cool southern winds, and of others who are ripping up the more sensitive white-grape vines to replace them with thicker-skinned red varietals: shiraz, for example, is known as a grape that can handle anything. The hot new places, or, rather, the cool ones, to grow wine in South Africa are Cape Point, and Cape Agulhas, the two most southern points on the continent.
