Another climate change horror.
The Australian reports:
Researchers in Australia say they have pinpointed key factors in the early ripening of grapes, providing potential answers for wine growers threatened by global warming.
In Australia and Western Europe, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence linking higher temperatures with earlier grape maturation, a phenomenon that can affect the quality of table wine.
But wine growing and climate change are each highly complex questions.
Until now, no one has sorted out how the variables – warming, sunlight, soil moisture and vineyard management – each play a role in grape maturation.
A team led by Leanne Webb at the CSIRO looked at 10 sites in southern Australia where there were highly detailed records, stretching from 1985 to 2009, for all of these factors.
Only at one site – at Margaret River on Australia’s southwestern tip – did the grapes ripen later. For the others, maturation occurred between six to 34 days earlier…
This isn’t just junk science. It’s junket science! “Hey, y’all, let’s go visit
some wineries!”
They should have reported on which wines they liked best.
In this and all such research, it is one thing to point to the weather as the cause of any unfavorable result, such as early grape ripening, it is another to decide therefore that man-made climate change is the cause of unfavorable weather.
California wines have demonstrated for decades that the main factor affecting the quality of wines of the quality of the vintner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4GvN4wGUZI