Winemakers revive ancient varieties in search of grapes more resistant to extreme weather
quarta-feira, março 01, 2023
In agriculture, wine production is one of the most vulnerable to the climate crisis. In recent years, adverse weather events such as prolonged drought episodes and rising average temperatures have revealed an agricultural crop that is extremely sensitive to change. A warmer climate makes the grapes ripen faster, causing a race against time in the hope of protecting the carefully crafted balance between sugars and fruit acidity.
As wine producers around the world look for ways to tackle the problem, they look increasingly into the past, resurrecting late-ripening and heat-tolerant varieties.
In Spain, Miguel A Torres, president of the Torres Family winery, began researching these varieties lost in time as a way to rescue local cultural heritage, but it was not long before discovering that the benefits of these varieties went beyond. "I simply wanted to recover the heritage – the ancient traditions and vines – left to us by our ancestors. And then we realized that some of these varieties take longer to mature, which means they can help us in a warming world," Torres told The Guardian.
In California, winemakers are adopting grapes like mourtaou, an almost extinct variety from southwestern France. In Bordeaux, France, concerns about the climate crisis helped secure approval for six new grape varieties, including castets, a disease-resistant grape that was about to disappear.
According to José Miguel Martínez Zapater, director of the Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences, which is located in La Rioja, Spain, the reasons why these varieties have fallen into disuse vary widely. Some were abandoned in the late 19th century, when the phylloxera plague forced European producers to seek efficiency, while others were discarded because farmers sought to obey strictly defined designations of origin or consumer preferences for certain grapes.
With public funding, the institute has been developing for years a process to identify varieties, test their characteristics and seek official approval for their use. The efforts have helped increase the number of varieties registered commercially in Spain by 50% in the last two decades.
At the Agrarian Technological Institute of Castilla y Leon, the research has already led to the recovery of more than a dozen varieties, such as estaladiña, a grape whose last recorded reference dates back to 1914, and cenicienta, which was close to extinction before being revived to make fruity reds.
Source: Um só Planeta
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