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news for Sonoma, Marin & Napa Counties

“Official Newspaper of Mexico’s Unlikely Triumph Over France�

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F>D;3 14 C74 ?8CB Mendocino County grape grower and vintner Paul Dolan accedes that he and his sons could, if it just gets too hot, begin growing peaches.

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Vintners must adapt to climate change we can taste By Alastair Bland

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hen Paul Dolan first began purpling his hands with the juice of Mendocino County grapes, he was a young winemaker producing organic wines in a challenging, cool-weathered zone. It was 25 years ago, and he remembers struggling under the mild, late-summer sun of the era to bring his Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and other red wines into the 12 and 13 percent alcohol range. Today, as owner of Paul Dolan Vineyards, an older, more experienced Dolan still struggles—struggles to keep his wines below 15 percent ABV, for the climate, says Dolan, isn’t what it used to be. Higher temperatures and more sun produce higher levels of sugar in his ripening grapes, and winemakers around the world have felt similar effects of

the same warming trend. Dolan’s consulting winemaker, in fact, is a Frenchman, Christian LeSommer, who works at Chateau Latour in Bordeaux. LeSommer once had to encourage and coddle his grapes to produce enough sugar just to hit 10 percent ABV. Now, the very same vineyards are producing fruit bombs as big as some California Zins. In the Napa Valley, too, numbers are rising. According to Dr. Greg Jones, a geography and environmental studies professor at Southern Oregon University, wines in the Napa Valley increased in average alcohol levels from 12.5 percent by volume to 14.8 percent between 1971 and 2001. Winemaker decisions have surely contributed to these hotter wines, but Jones, whose research focuses on natural ecosystems and agriculture and their relation to climate, attributes at least 50 percent of the change to warmer weather each season.

In fact, temperature stations in the Napa Valley have recorded an increase in low nighttime temperatures of 3 degrees Celsius since 1930. Jones predicts that further change of the same magnitude could dramatically shake up California’s wines, and in the Napa Valley, where wine has made many rich, those invested in grapes have plenty to lose. Fine wine, which depends so much on terroir, looks likely to be affected first and most dramatically, and such wines can serve as an extremely sensitive barometer to environmental change. In fact, historians frequently cite the geographical north-south shifts of prime European wine country during the past millennium as evidence of the tremendous changes caused by the Little Ice Age and, before it, the Medieval Warm Period, when even Scots and Scandinavians grew grapes. Today, &&

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THE BOHEMIAN

04.28.10-05.04.10

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