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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRwVFGjlOwU
welcome thank you very much I'd like to start today by asking those in the audience do you enjoy wine good good organizers will you make free bottle wine when we %HESITATION my name's Greg Jones as %HESITATION the introductions %HESITATION then I'm to talk to by climate grapes and wine but first I'd like to a backup and talk about the importance of whether inclined in human history
we know that early civilizations as they were developing developed based upon strong agricultural systems that had to do with the climate being able to allow them to grow at a given crop if the climate change for one reason or another historically they migrated move somewhere else or decide to grow something or raise a different type of animal so climate has been very important and today just
like in the past we know the climate influences everything we do in agriculture through controlling the suitability of a crop to a given area through influencing quality and productivity and ultimately driving economic sustainability %HESITATION anywhere in the world when we talk about climate in agriculture we can typically talk about two broad categories brought acre crops or specialty crops the idea here is is that these crops
divide the system into how we see them geographically while Broderick her crops such as corn wheat rice and soybeans grown across a very wide geographic can therefore climatic range specialty crops have a tendency to be grown or fairly narrow geographic areas and very narrow climate ranges when I was young PAC student of it starting to look at studying climate in climatology my advisors all suggested to
me to study abroad acre crops because there were very important for food security however I was %HESITATION very much interested in the intricate and delicate nature of power claim it %HESITATION influence growing specialty crops %HESITATION especially when I was looking at something like the culture and wine production are in the system arguably climate is the most important factor to growing the crop in making wine so
as such I went down this path to look at the system some people ask me they said this is a pretty superfluous %HESITATION thing to study alcohol but alcohol is been with us so for his %HESITATION throughout history and it's helped shape who we are and so I thought that was a very interesting aspect of studies and wine which pay which embodies all kinds of characteristics
associated with art and history of %HESITATION gastronomy of romanticism of science of all kinds is was it all tied up in this one agricultural pursuits for me was just too rich of a system to the to not study so that's right %HESITATION went down this path to become a wind climatologists now we say that somebody had to do it so I want to start here by
%HESITATION talking about something we've learned over time about this term called terroir not terror bitter war tower is %HESITATION comes from the Latin terrier territory its first modern definition is based upon a stretch of of land limited by its agricultural capacity within the concept of terroir you typically is trying to describe all of the factors that go into growing grapes making why this includes the variety
in terms of how it's being grown but this also includes all of the natural factors such as climate landscape geology and soil the go into growing grapes making wine however there's a tremendous cultural aspect to her cultural factors are extremely important %HESITATION especially in in terms of how we decide what variety goes where and how those winds are being made from the fruit grown in those
vineyards so the cultural component is extremely important now up all the natural factors ha that go into growing grapes make you want it is pretty clear that climate is the kind of the baseline expression that we can all %HESITATION of kind of agree on and understand I think most of you as well of the in the audience on the the very baseline expression here is the
difference between wine styles we can all tell a wine that typically comes from a cool climate or a warm climate it could climb it winds tend to be lighter more subtle they have le le pire est city very crisp they tend to have bright fruit flavors well once I come from a warmer terroir hesitancy be fuller %HESITATION deeper color duh higher alcohol and and darker fruits
so we all know that that that this wine style framework is really being driven by climate what happens with geology and soil is is that they influence the overall subtle nature of those expressions within a given region under within a given tenured so it all plays an important role but climate is the main driver here another component of this is is that to claim it really
isn't a strong driver in quality and productivity that happens within the terroir framework things so as I've been looking at those terroir isn't important kind of construct that we use to describe kind of what's happening with and crime rates and making one so this leads me to talk a bit about relationships on when we look at the overall framework a growing grapes and make you want
we know that it takes quite a bit to be able to produce a given crop of for high quality we know we have to understand this though the structure of the climate in a given region what that looks like in terms of growing season Langford and rainfall time being an extreme offense but we also need to know how that structure drives the suitability to any given
variety grown there but beyond structure and suitability we also have to have a framework behind which we can understand how climate variability influences quality and productivity but today more than ever we also need to understand how a changing climate influences all of this whether it changes the structure in a given region the suitability to varieties and or the overall variability in a region is all very
current porn this is critical because one breaks or a narrow specialty crop that %HESITATION that are really prone to changes in climate overall %HESITATION so what I've been doing is trying to study what these the spring market is for one great production not only globally but also here locally within our region so this leads me to the idea that some of you might say are you
thinking about right now the idea that is there an ideal climate for one product well I've been trying to study this for about twenty five years or so now and %HESITATION I think we know something's there or were sharing %HESITATION number one I've been looking at this concept behind what's called a climate niche a niche of our climate niche is essentially the climatic environment that any
organism Weatherby a planter an animal functions the best %HESITATION for one grapes this basically means if you plan to write rape in the right place or going to get more consistent quality and more consistent productivity over the long term %HESITATION now as we look at it overall climate structures of places %HESITATION worldwide we know that climate in general is based upon what we all kind of
lead to believe these Mediterranean climate structures out there in the world %HESITATION it's mostly it's true because we have this history with Europe and we look at these areas so we try to understand what their framework is all about but I can tell you that wine grapes are today Chrono cross over huge range of mid latitude zones they're very suitable to crying %HESITATION quite a few
different varieties may affect hundreds of varieties can be grown across landscapes all over the world %HESITATION to produce different wine sells some of these places are more suitable to a cooler climate varieties %HESITATION summer more suitable to a warmer climate varieties but their overall framework here is is that there's a rich amount of %HESITATION of of of variola material that can be grown in different places
throughout the world in terms of what we can produce so a lot of this is led me to studying these aspects of these climate niches and trying to better understand what variety does best where and how and in doing so that's led me to this idea of suitability %HESITATION how can we understand suitability relative to any crop let alone something as complex as a growing grapes
and making one I collected data from places all over the world to try to best better understand this and in doing so I I I I have worked up to a diagram that's very useful to illustrate the concept here %HESITATION this diagram %HESITATION is a representation of twenty one of the most common varieties grown worldwide you can pick out your favor and what it is is
it represents the climate niche of these varieties based upon where and how they can be grown best throughout the world %HESITATION I also have table grapes and raisins here just put an upper bound on the whole framework because of where the warmest areas are for grape vines %HESITATION two different things are being %HESITATION shown here and we'll get to a third in a moment about the
two different things are largely the climate type in which the Israelis can be grown and whether it's cool intermediate warmer hot but also %HESITATION %HESITATION though potential wine style and to describe a little bit more wanna talk about Pino nor most of you probably know organs number one Friday is piano are what can be grown over a fairly narrow climb into about four degrees Fahrenheit globally
and in doing so on the cool and we have places like Tasmania on the warm and we have places like the Russian river valley in in the middle we have places like Burgundy and the Willamette Valley what happens here is is that people who are that's grown on the cool and tends to be a lighter bodied lighter colored more subtle wine well it's grown on the
warmer and it tends to be a more fuller party body darker color Pena nor one so that's the one style potential that can happen in this framework and and if you really think about it you could describe the same thing for anyone on the Friday he sits on the list %HESITATION another another aspect of this I think is important you might be saying what can these
Friday speak grown outside these bounds yes they can the people do it however the climate is such that unreliable yields typically are produced and then quality tends to be more questionable are sketchy and so it's not a very marketable product within these bounds you tend to be more consistent overall another way of looking at this site in terms this diagrams to talk about regions a developed
a concept artist looking at what I call the climatic envelope for a given region so this is the essentially the coolest of the warmest places in a region and how it can write in any variety we can talk about a couple places fierce Burgundy Burgundy is psalm a relatively cool climate area and gross mostly Peter Norton Chardonnay and you can see why its climate envelope is
basically central to that we can also look at a warm climate place like Bordeaux Bordeaux little bit again looked at warmer it's can it can ripen us a different range of varieties and also produces a different range of styles so that brings me to talk about way here we're in the employ of Ali Forgan %HESITATION very prominent wine region in the state worse it's climate niche
in was it looked like well it's basically somewhat moved in the middle of these two %HESITATION Burgundy in Bordeaux and the framework here is you should be able see right away that its wider what's wider because the region of the on call valley is larger we also have more elevation all differences in latitude for so we have a bigger climate to envelope but we do overlap
we have some characteristic climates this %HESITATION that are very similar to Burgundy and some their little some large Bordeaux as well so this leads me to talk about climate change a lot of well documented changes that have happened out there %HESITATION in terms of climate and a climate controlled factors and wine regions %HESITATION we know that %HESITATION growing seasons have gone warmer longer you know that
winter periods have been %HESITATION warmer as well the plants are telling us that things are changing because they have earlier but breaking flowering at heart we also know that ripening characteristics are profiles of change %HESITATION we've been %HESITATION accumulating more sugar and producing slightly higher alcohol wines and therefore one styles have changed because of it pistons it diseases have changed we've also seen some changes overall
and characteristics of soil erosion infertility but we've also seen water %HESITATION resource changes were some places of gotten dryer in some places have have gone water but let's look at a very basic change getting back to this diagram that we've just been talking about and put it into a framework of trying to understand how changes in climate influence not only help varieties can be produced but
how regions can produce those for ID's setup based on their climate envelope chemical back to Burgundy Burgundy in the nineteen fifties was relatively cool cooler than it is today and it was still able to produce pure orange Chardonnay it's two marquee varieties but did it in a slightly different wine style framework if you of course fast forward to where we are today you can see that
that shift of a couple of degrees is more central to those two varieties and so therefore allows it to be %HESITATION produce more consistently if we look at conservative estimates of warming in the future Burgundy will likely end up here the climatic in the local beyond they warm upper end for Pino are and Chardonnay it doesn't remove them from the ability to produce those winds but
what it does is it changes the wind style overall framework to take and produce their %HESITATION if we if we look at this though this is a conservative projection of climate in the future what happens if it changes to more extremes that we kind of tend to think might happen this would put Burgundy in a completely different framework were only the coolest places can potentially %HESITATION
ripened fruit in the future %HESITATION and potentially there will be other varieties that can be done there how about if we go to where we are again here in the on call value and think about it we go back to the nineteen fifties in the on call valley the climates where little cooler than they are today the first pioneers that came here in the nineteen sixties
planted varieties that were more so associated with a cooler climate did fairly well fast forward to today this is our climate envelope we still produce some those cool climate varieties but now we've shifted a little bit and we're producing %HESITATION other varieties how about conservative warming in the growing seasons of four to five degrees Fahrenheit by twenty fifty this is what our climate envelope would be
like we would be shifting a little bit in terms of what we can do but we also be opening up blah potentially to new varieties in terms of our overall productivity capability so that leads me to the idea of what does the future hold well first we know that today climate is warmer than any time in our recorded past we also know that continued warming is
highly likely Bob climate change has the ability to affect every single agricultural pursued the narrow zones of of one great production are especially prone to climate change and so have provided us some good evidence of kind of these type of impacts into a specialty crop system %HESITATION so as we look forward to the future we have to think a little bit about kind of what this
means for the overall perspective a wine grape growing we know that the past fifty years have benefited quality of wine worldwide with some climate change but our projections into the future have a tendency to appoint to the idea that some beneficial impacts will happen but will likely have some detrimental impacts as well I personally believe that Oregon has plenty to gain from overall climate change and