In Northern France, Warming Presses Fall Grape Harvest Into Summertime

By Molly Moore
Washington Post

ROUFFACH, France -- On a cobweb-encrusted rafter above his giant steel grape pressers, René Muré is charting one of the world's most tangible barometers of global warming.

The evidence, scrawled in black ink, is the first day of the annual grape harvest for the past three decades. In 1978, it was Oct. 16. In 1998, the date was Sept. 14. This year, harvesting started Aug. 24 -- the earliest ever recorded, not only in Muré's vineyards, but also in the entire Alsace wine district of northeastern France.

"I noticed the harvest was getting earlier before anybody had a name for it," said 59-year-old Muré, the 11th generation of his family to produce wine from the clay and limestone slopes of the Vosges Mountains near the German border. "When I was young, we were harvesting in October with snow on the mountaintops. Today we're harvesting in August."

Throughout the wine-producing world, from France to South Africa to California, vintners are in the vanguard of confronting the impact of climate change. Rising temperatures are forcing unprecedented early harvests, changing the tastes of the best-known varieties of wine and threatening the survival of centuries-old wine-growing regions.

In the hot Mediterranean vineyards -- the first to feel the effects of longer, drier summers -- vintners are harvesting grapes at night to protect the fragile fruit at the critical picking stage. Growers in Spain, Italy and southern France are buying land at higher terrains for future vineyards.

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