The Errant Æsthete

Miguel Torres SA’s vineyards have survived bombs and plagues of parasites in the past 137 years. Now, the eponymous head of Spain’s largest family-owned winemaker says he’s facing a new threat: global warming.

“We are moving into cooler areas of Catalonia, which has the great advantage of having the Pyrenees 200 kilometers from here,” Miguel A. Torres, 64, says in an interview at Mas Rabell de Fontenac, a 14th-century farmhouse near the company’s headquarters in southern Catalonia. “We have already planted vineyards successfully that we can use in the future.”

The fourth-generation vintner has planted vines a kilometer (0.6 miles) above sea-level in the Pyrenean foothills near Tremp, northern Spain: four times higher than the main winery. Torres plans to buy more land in cooler areas, and is spending 10 million euros ($13.6 million) to cut his company’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

Torres aims to adapt to rising temperatures that scientists and vintners say may change Europe’s 16 billion-euro winemaking industry, with growing belts moving uphill and north. While northern areas, like England, stand to gain, Mediterranean nations such as Spain, France and Italy, the three largest producers, will need to adjust.

The effects of warming are already visible across the industry. Torres says harvests are two weeks earlier than 40 years ago. In Germany, grapevines this year blossomed earlier than ever, the country’s Wine Institute said June 4. And in France, irrigation of vines was legalized in December.

Microbiological Bomb

The quantity of wine produced isn’t at risk: the European Union estimates its 27 members will make 15 percent too much by 2011. However, the quality from regions that have fermented grapes for generations may drop, experts say.

“The real problem climate change brings is it gives a high grade of alcohol, combined with low acidity,” says Pancho Campo, founder of Spain’s Wine Academy. “That turns the wine into a microbiological bomb. The wines lose their ability to age, and because acidity is so low, the freshness is lost.”

Global warming last century actually helped improve wines, says Gregory Jones, a scientist at the University of Southern Oregon who’s written 20 papers on the topic.

Jones found average growing season temperatures across 27 wine-producing regions increased by 1.26 degrees Celsius (2.27 degrees Fahrenheit) from 1950 to 1999, aiding growing conditions. He also found wines scored “significantly” higher on a 100- point quality scale devised by Sotheby’s. After allowing for other causes, such as better winemaking techniques, Jones concluded the scores improved by 13 points per degree of warming.

Pushing Limits

Many regions are now at an optimum temperature, and further predicted gains of 2 degrees over 50 years may force regulatory changes in countries such as France, which has strict guidelines on where certain varieties of grapes are grown, says Jones.

“Every single grape variety has its limits,” he says, adding that styles of wines associated with particular regions will shift elsewhere.

“The challenge with changing climates in the future is that, where’s the threshold by which a Burgundy becomes a Beaujolais?” Jones asks, charting a move from southwest coastal France to a hilly area further north and east. “Governments need to allow regions to adapt to a warmer environment.”

Spain’s Torres agrees with Jones, and says Catalonia’s vintners will have to act soon.

“In the next 10 years, we will see grapes which are doing well today by the sea, they will move to the central valley,” he says, mapping out a northward progression. “Those in the central valley, Tempranillo, they will go up to the mountains.”

Bombs, Parasites

Torres’s ancestors have grown vines for more than three centuries, and the company was founded in 1870. Since then, it’s survived a plague of phylloxera insects that ravaged Europe’s vines in the late nineteenth century. In 1939, the bodega was destroyed by aerial bombardment during the Spanish Civil War.

The company owns more than 1,750 hectares of vines in Spain, Chile and California, including the main site at Pacs with a bottling plant and bodega, and the 104-hectare Sant Miquel vineyard in Tremp, Torres’s highest, averaging 950 meters.

Raul Bobet, who’s planted 23 hectares of vines across the valley from Sant Miquel, thinks the altitude will spare his vines the worst ravages of warming.

“I decided to set up a vineyard at 1,000 meters because of climate change: I’m very concerned about grape quality,” says Bobet, 48, surveying sloped fields of Sauvignon Blanc, Albarino and Riesling grapes. “By having these cooler nights and the influence of the Pyrenees, I’ll get that here.”

A former Torres employee himself, with 23 years’ experience in the industry, Bobet is building a winery, and hopes eventually to produce 80,000 bottles a year under the label Encus.

English Bubbly

While vintners in Spain, which leads France and Italy in acres planted, are looking to the hills to preserve their trade, the climate in northern Europe is increasingly accessible to the production of quality wines. One beneficiary is the U.K.

Stephen Spurrier, consulting editor for the trade magazine Decanter, says warmer temperatures persuaded him it’s time to plant on the farm his wife bought two decades ago in Dorset, southwest England.

“I had the soil analyzed by a French expert from Chablis at that time, and he said it’s absolutely perfect for vines, but the climate in 1987 was absolutely imperfect, so I gave up on the idea,” says Spurrier. “Over the last decade or so it’s becoming plainer and plainer that sparkling wines are the thing for the U.K. If it all goes well, we’ll plant in the spring.”

Too Precious

Burgeoning demand for English sparkling wines has meant some producers are unable to keep up. At Ridgeview Vineyard in Sussex, southern England, Mike Roberts, 63, this year hopes to produce 150,000 bottles of bubbly, up a half from last year. By 2009 he plans to double that.

“We have tremendous demand on our wines to the point that we really cannot supply everybody,” Roberts says in a field of pinot meunier vines, one of three types used to make champagne. “I can’t afford to drink my own wine, because it’s wine that we desperately need for the customers. It’s too precious.”

Roberts says the improvement in English wines — his own have garnered dozens of prizes from organizations including the International Wine Challenge — is down to better growing conditions, and also to a “less amateurish” approach. In the future, he says, warming may benefit England as champagne producers, or champenois, look to U.K. shores to grow grapes.

`We Did Our Best’

“By 2050, potentially, we could be and will be making the quintessential sparkling wine that champagne was, and they will perhaps, in a quality scenario be taking second place,” Roberts says. “But that’s a really rude thing to say, because I love champagne.”

For his part, Torres is fighting climate change as well as adapting, by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed by United Nations scientists for global warming. To that end, he’s replacing cars for his 115-person sales force with hybrid vehicles, insulating fermenting towers to save energy, and installing photovoltaic panels to generate heat and 670 kilowatts of electricity, 11 percent of needs at the main site in Pacs.

“In 20 years’ time, when I’m very old and my grandchildren ask me `what have you done? Look at the planet you are giving us’,” says Torres, “At least I’ll be able to tell them `well listen, we did what we could, we did our best.”’

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