How to make investment bankers care about global warming

You knew that global warming was bad. But did you know it was this

bad?

If it gets too warm, what is going to happen with traditional wines like

Barolo and Burgundy? They grow in such specifically mild climates and settings,

after all; are these going to be the last vintages of these great wines?

I’ ve been reading several articles on the subject, and two of them struck

me as particularly relevant:

one was about California and how in the next 20 years, with the current trend,

the conditions to grow grapes there will no longer exist.

In fact, already the alcohol content of most California wines is very high;

hotter weather will result in higher sugar content and less water in the grapes.

This natural occurrence has advanced to the point where wineries are now investing

large sums of money in very expensive Spinning

Cone Column machines, or in the painstaking process of reverse osmosis

to remove a certain percentage of excess alcohol (euphemistically described

by the Conetech Corporation as "volatile flavor components") from

wines…

Pietro Colla, chief winemaker of Poderi Colla winery told me that in 2006

he harvested his Dolcetto at the beginning of September, almost a month earlier

than usual, and that the alcohol measured out to 15 % in some parts of the

estate (nearly two points higher than is normal for Dolcetto). Gianluigi Maravalle,

owner of Vitalonga estate, told me that the 2006 was among the hottest years

in the recent past: but more importantly, he had to delay the pruning of his

vines by couple of months because the plants didn’t "shut down,"

or go into dormancy.

Bankers have a habit of thinking about global warming in terms of ways to make

money. (They think about just about everything in terms of ways to

make money.) But if you tell them that it could mean the end of fine Burgundies…