Uphill battle: Spain’s wine growers adapt to climate change
For over a century, Joaquin Gay de Montella Estany’s family produced wine in Spain’s Mediterranean region of Catalonia but the effects of climate change have pushed them to seek higher ground. Now their Torre del Veguer winery also has vineyards at the foot of the Pyrenees mountains – at an altitude of nearly 1,200 metres – where temperatures are cooler. It’s one of the ways in which Spain’s wine producers are trying to adapt, as a warmer climate advances the harvest season and makes the need for more heat-tolerant grape varieties greater. In searing August heat, farm workers pick the white grapes by hand at a vineyard with sea views in Penedes, about 40 kilometres south of the city of Barcelona. Higher temperatures have brought the grape harvest forward by 10 to 15 days over the past decade, said Gay de Montella Estany, who owns the ecological winery. “We have to harvest at the start of August when the heat is the most intense,” he told AFP. So in 2008, the company moved part of its production to Bolvir, a village in the Pyrenees near the French border. Speedy ripening With a total of 961,000 hectares of vines, Spain has the largest area of vineyards in the world, the...