Climate Change

Biography

Biography: Denyse Lemaire

Abstract

Burgundy is one of the major wine producing regions of France with more than 31,000 hectares covered in vines. For the past two decades, reports about climate change and the effects it has or may have on viticulture have been published. Because the grape’s cycle of budding, veraison, and maturation is precisely regulated by temperature, Burgundy’s wine growers have clear evidence of the reality of the warming trend climate change scientists have reported; harvest dates are now significantly earlier than in previous years (13 days in Beaune and 12 days in La Rochepot in the Hautes Cotes). This discussion will examine how the confluence of scholarly prediction and popular experience has had an interesting but unfortunate impact on the risk management strategies of many small-scale growers, whose equation of climate and weather has led to an unwarranted assumption of the predictable regularity of destructive environmental events.