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It
was Labor Day 2017, and the remote
thermometer at McIntyre Estate Vineyard
in Monterey County’s Santa Lucia
Highlands was registering a noontime
temperature Steve McIntyre couldn’t
quite believe: 104 degrees.
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McIntyre
jumped in his car, hoping the sensor was
broken. Twenty miles later he stepped
out into the searing air at his vineyard
and knew there was no mistake. It would
hit 116 before the day was over, the
hottest since he first planted the site
in 1973.
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“It
felt like a gut punch,” he said.
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The
U.S. is the largest wine-producing
country outside Europe, and 80% of that
output comes from California. For an
industry in which even subtle shifts in
temperature or humidity can transform a
harvest’s value, increasing
extremes and unpredictability pose an
existential threat.
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Grape leaves change colors with the
season at a vineyard in the Santa Cruz
Mountains in November 2024. (Tomas
Ovalle / For The Times)
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Extreme
heat can kill a vine just as it can a
human. As temperatures rise, so does the
speed at which vines pull water from the
soil. Once a plant starts losing water
faster than it can rehydrate, it mounts
a perilous last-ditch effort to save
itself.
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The
stomates — the parts of the leaf that
control gas and water exchange — close
up in an attempt to reduce water loss.
Photosynthesis slows to a crawl. That
can kick off further complications that,
without emergency intervention, can be
fatal.
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“It’s
just like a cascade of things that start
happening,” said McIntyre, who also runs
the vineyard management company Monterey
Pacific. “I really do compare it to a
human with heat stroke.”
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This
month, researchers from Japan’s Tohoku
University published a granular
investigation of California
viticulture in a changing climate. After
mapping a roughly 16-square-kilometer
grid of the state, the team ran each
cell through multiple climate models to
generate data on current and future
weather conditions. They then fed that
information into an algorithm to analyze
wine cultivation suitability over time.
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What
they found was a redrawn map of
California’s prime wine regions.
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The
team based its definition of suitability
primarily on total annual precipitation,
cumulative temperature across the
growing season, minimum temperature of
the coldest month and vapor pressure
deficit, meaning the difference between
the amount of moisture in the air at a
given point and the amount it could hold
when saturated.
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For decades, viticulturists and
researchers have sounded the alarm how
climate change could upend a signature
industry in California. Above, vineyards
dot the hillsides in Watsonville. (Tomas
Ovalle / For The Times)
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Under
their model, suitability for grape
cultivation may decline over the next 70
years in Napa and Sonoma counties, which
currently dominate the state’s premium
wine market. Expected climate changes
like increased precipitation, lower
relative temperature increases and a
decrease in extreme fire-weather days in
Monterey and Mendocino counties, in
contrast, would significantly increase
the area’s suitability for wine
production.
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Viticulturists
and researchers have been sounding the
alarm about a changing climate’s
potential to upend this signature state
industry for decades. In 2011, a
Stanford University study
projected that land suitable for
cultivating premium wine grapes in
California’s North Coast region, which
includes Napa and Sonoma, could halve by
2040. Winegrape-bearing acreage in
California has shrunk
steadily since 2013.
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Yet
these outcomes aren’t inscribed in
stone. The model didn’t account for
climate adaptations, which virtually all
of California’s winemakers are already
implementing.
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McIntyre’s
Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines survived
the 2017 heat wave, in part because the
vineyard was already experimenting with
shade canopies and could roll them out
across the site quickly.
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Elsewhere,
winemakers are adopting misters and
low-water irrigation systems, replanting
their rows in directions that avoid the
peak of the afternoon sun and even
experimenting with heat-tolerant
grape varietals.
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“By
changing when the grapes are picked or
how they are managed in the field,
growers can adapt to global warming
without completely replacing their
crops,” said Yusuke Hiraga, an assistant
professor of engineering at Tohoku
University and the lead author of the
study. “These flexible management
techniques are expected to be highly
useful in protecting wine quality.”
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More
climate news
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The
Times’ water reporter Ian James has the
alarming news that Lake Mead and Lake
Powell, the nation’s two largest
reservoirs, have fallen to their lowest
combined levels on record.
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Lake
Mead, the country’s largest reservoir,
is 27% full. Lake Powell, the
second-largest, is at just 23% of
capacity and is just 33 feet away from
no longer being able to generate
hydroelectric power.
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For
the 35 million
people and 5 million acres
of farmland that depend on the Colorado
River for water, this is a big deal.
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“It’s
a hell of a milestone,” said Jack
Schmidt, director of Utah State
University’s Center for Colorado River
Studies. “If you need any more evidence
that we have a five-alarm fire, here it
is.”
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On
Tuesday, the U.S. Department of the
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum met with
governors of the seven states that rely
on the Colorado River for water,
including California. The agency will
release a plan to deal with water
shortages next week, Burgum said
afterward.
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Most
of California’s water allotment goes to
agriculture, and many growers are
already preparing for a drier future. My
colleague Blanca Begert recently
traveled to California’s Central Valley,
where some farmers are leasing
their acres to solar companies.
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California
is legally mandated to reach 100% clean
electricity by 2045, an effort that will
require an additional 10 gigawatts of
clean energy a year and between 0.5
and 1.3 million acres of
in-state solar development, Blanca and
Ian reported. According to the Public
Policy Institute of California, solar on
retired farmland in the Central Valley
could contribute up to 30 gigawatts
of solar capacity.
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Switching
from crops to solar isn’t like
experimenting with a new grape varietal.
It’s a total shift of a farm or region’s
identity, and the story notes that some
of the largest arrays are planned for
places that have historically been
strongly anti-solar.
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“Growers
are feeling pinched,” Caitlin Peterson,
associate director of the PPIC Water
Policy Center, told them. “Solar is one
of the potential options for folks that
are having to take land out of
production that has the potential to be
fairly lucrative.”
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One
more thing
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As
Sunday’s World Cup final between
Argentina and Spain approached, a
perfect storm of heat, humidity and
smoke from Canada’s wildfires appeared
poised to overshadow the game in East
Rutherford, N.J. FIFA officials
discussed an emergency change of venue.
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The
day before the final, thunderstorms
blew away the worst of the
smoke. Spain claimed victory in
temperatures in the low
80s, with relatively low
humidity.
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But
nearly 20% of this year’s World Cup
matches took place in heat and humidity
conditions that the players’ union has
deemed hazardous, an analysis by
the Guardian found.
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The
morning after the U.S. loss to Belgium
in the World Cup’s Round of 16, I spoke to
Dr. Bert Mandelbaum, chief medical
officer for U.S. men’s soccer and vice
chair of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s
orthopedic surgery department.
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He
pointed out that virtually every aspect
of the game degrades in the heat.
Performance, recovery ability and
decision-making erode. Artificial turf
becomes intolerably hot, and the soil in
natural grass can harden until it’s like
playing on concrete. Air molecules
inside the ball expand, making it a
harder and faster object whose
trajectory is harder to predict.
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Even
though the new mandatory hydration
breaks got a lot of fans hot under the
collar, they’re a necessary part
of player safety, Mandelbaum said.
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“Difficult
weather environments bring on
dehydration and can create severe
exhaustion, heat exhaustion, and those
[conditions] have tremendous and dire
consequences,” Mandelbaum said.
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