Like a glass of wine after work? Climate change may wipe out your favorite, study says

If you like to enjoy a nice glass of wine, a new study has some bad news for you: Climate change is drastically threatening the wine regions of the world.

If temperatures rise, growers will have a much harder time growing grapes for good wine, according to a new study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A 2-degree Celsius temperature increase would mean regions where wine grapes can be grown would shrink by 56%. If temperatures rise by 4 degrees, 85% of that land would be threatened, the study says.

“In some ways, wine is like the canary in the coal mine for climate change impacts on agriculture, because these grapes are so climate-sensitive,” co-author Benjamin Cook from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a EurekAlert! news release.

All hope for good wine may not be lost, though. Your wine habits aren’t doomed, but they could change. The study also shared ways growers could adapt to climate change by changing the grape varieties grown.

The study showed that by switching to grapes more suitable for the increases, only about 24% of the grapes would be lost instead of the 56%. In the 4 degree-increase scenario, changing the varieties reduced losses from 85% to 58%, the news release says.

There are more than 1,100 varieties of wine grapes growing today, according to EurekAlert!, but they’re sensitive to changes in temperature.

“The key is that there are still opportunities to adapt viticulture to a warmer world,” Cook said. “It just requires taking the problem of climate change seriously.”

This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Like a glass of wine after work? Climate change may wipe out your favorite, study says."