You won’t find those in many grocery stores today, but they’ve been on the shelves of specialty shops for years. “Something from areas very similar in climate.” “Probably a Primitivo, a Tempranillo, a Negroamaro, a Nero d’Avola,” he said, naming wines typical of Southern Europe, including Sicily. I asked Zaccaria what wine he thinks he’ll be reaching for in 30 years, when preparing a nice meal and pairing it with a quintessential California wine. is technology and knowledge, and we’ll find a way to make Cabernet last,” said Kaan Kurtural, cooperative extension specialist in viticulture at UC Davis. “The thing we have at our disposal in the U.S. In hotter climates, like Napa Valley, Jon Priest of Etude Wines is using computer models and artificial intelligence to improve growing and irrigation techniques, and vines can be pruned in a way that creates a canopy of shade over grapes. Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat said he’s got the same golden ribbon of marine climate in the valleys near Santa Maria, where his chardonnay grapes grow. Just west of Buellton, Kathy Joseph of Fiddlehead Cellars told me fog still pumps through the valley and creates a perfect growing environment for her pinot noir grapes. Not everyone thinks California’s big-money grapes - cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir and chardonnay - will wither, and some of those grapes still prosper in cooler micro-climates throughout California. “We have to adapt to what’s going on in the world. in the last 30 years won’t be suitable in the next 30 years,” Petroski said. “Maybe cabernet, pinot noir, chardonnay and other grape varieties that built Napa and Sonoma. Under his own label, Massican, he makes Italian-inspired white wine from grapes including greco, pinot bianco, friulano and ribolla gialla, which he says seem to be handling climate change pretty well. “We’ll see what works best,” said Petroski, who isn’t entirely wedded to red wine. Those sturdy reds might not be as familiar tasting as Cabernet, and they don’t have anywhere near the cachet, but they can handle heat. Here, surrounded by trellised rows of cabernet vines, he’s got young stalks of aglianico, charbono, tempranillo, shiraz and touriga nacional. At Larkmead, he led me to a three-acre research block he has planted with grapes you may never have heard of - grapes he hopes have a better chance of standing up to climate change than cabernet. For 10 years, he said, winemakers have been doing things like shading and misting vines, but he sees a day when “there’s no silver bullet that’s going to mitigate climate change.”Īnd Petroski isn’t just talking and writing about the problem. Petroski loves Cabernet and makes some of the finest in Napa Valley for Larkmead Vineyards, a high-end producer founded in the 1890s. “The changes in climate that are predicted both worldwide and in the Napa Valley mean that in 10, 20, or 30 years’ time…Napa will be a different agricultural region,” Petroski wrote recently for a trade publication. It doesn’t stand up to extreme heat as well as many lesser-known varieties. And it turns out, that’s one of the grapes that may be most imperiled. Miles of roller-coaster slopes are crocheted with the vines of California’s king of grapes - cabernet sauvignon, often just referred to as cabernet or cab. It had been a while since I traveled the Napa Valley wine trail, and I’d forgotten how beautiful it is. On June 10 this year, the thermometer at the San Francisco airport hit 100, the highest temperature on record in the months of June, July and August. On summer excursions to San Francisco from Contra Costa County when I was a kid, we brought jackets because the city was always cool in the summer. Having grown up in the Bay Area, not far from wine country, I recall hot and breezy summer days as the reliable norm, but definitely not with the kind of lightning storms Northern California is now seeing. I beat the fires and thousands of lightning strikes by a week, but even without an inferno bearing down, what I found was alarming, though I also saw encouraging innovations. After a lot of time on the phone with vintners and climate experts, I took to the highway during the second week of August to see what was happening in the vineyards.
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