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| Companion plantings under pergolas in Spain |
I have started coming across more and more stories about people doing things as preposterous as we have been. Here's the story of a guy who has planted vines in Patagonia in a region where climate change may take 50 years to produce conditions appropriate for making good wines. But it's a 50-year gamble people are willing to make. And Bloomberg news noticed. Somehow, planting grapevines in the west of Ireland is sounding less and less crazy.
'Navarrete, for one, has come to embrace the plan. Initially, he had found it to be preposterous. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” he recalls. “I thought they were crazy.”'
Wine Enthusiast published an exhaustive article on the effects that climate change is already having on winemaking and they are not all bad -- earlier harvests, better complexity, and higher alcohol content. But in places where the planted vines are having a hard time with extreme weather events, "A greater number of producers are rethinking canopy management, vine trellising or pruning techniques, developing cover crops and extensive shading methods, increasing vineyard biodiversity and finding ways to reuse water." This is all stuff we are already undertaking.
And when The Union of Bordeaux AOC and Bordeaux Supérieur winemakers unanimously approved in 2019 a list of seven “varieties of interest for adapting to climate change: Arinarnoa, Castets, Marselan, Touriga Nacional, Alvarinho, Liliorila and Petit Manseng -- seeing Avarinho among them was truly encouraging. I had also researched Castets, Marselan, and Touriga as well. Let's see where they go with this. I am encouraged.
