This article at Slate details how global warming might affect the northernmost wine regions and improve the quality of the grapes. This isn't particularly new—Gastronomica ran a similar article years ago—but it is interesting. The wine growers I spoke to in the Mosel are very aware of global warming, which tends to have more pronounced effects further up the ladder rungs of latitude lines. The Saar tributary no longer creates grapes with quite the same amount of acidity, and ripeness has ceased to be an issue for well-tended Mosel vineyards. The string of banner years speaks to this quiet shift.
But the Slate article fails to touch on an issue covered by the Gastronomica piece, which is that certain types of grapes might cease to do well in the regions where they now grow. Austria will lose the ability to produce great Grüner Veltliner, the Russian River Valley will no longer make Pinot Noir. Maybe that's not a problem, certainly not on the order of the worlwide famines, droughts, and disease outbreaks we can expect as the earth continues to heat up, but it does point to the creeping, subtle effects of global warming. The same long-term, unchanging-on-a-human-scale effects that make it difficult to catch the ear of policy makers.
