For those of you who follow national and international trends in wine grapes and wine production, you may be interested in some recent articles I have seen on the impacts of weather on wine production both here in the US and abroad.

One of the biggest stories, of course, has been the destruction of several wineries in the Napa and Sonoma valleys of northern California. My blog at https://site.extension.uga.edu/climate/2017/10/california-fires-wreak-havoc-on-wineries-homes/ provided links to a number of related stories on the impacts of those fires.  You can also read about potential impacts of the smoke on wines at Food & Wine here.

I don’t think of Minnesota as a wine-growing region, but apparently they had an excellent year for wine grapes.  You can read more about it at https://blogs.mprnews.org/updraft/2017/10/a-good-year-for-minnesota-wine-grapes/.

Conde Nast Traveler noted that because of extremely warm conditions and drought this year, France is set to produce its lowest amount of wine in 60 years.  You can read about it here. This is in addition to the loss of 30% of Italian wines, which I mentioned in an earlier blog post.  There are also a large number of wildfires in Spain and Portugal this month, but apparently most of them are in wooded areas so I don’t know how much, if at all, wine production there is affected.

The remains of the fire-damaged Signorello Estate winery. Jim Wilson/The New York Times

 

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