En Passant

French winemakers are a down to terroir sort of people.

A group of them, plus sommeliers and chefs, viticulturists and ecologists, together with Greenpeace, have just warned in Le Monde that man-made global warming is threatening French wine.

So while Senator Fielding is sipping his Chateauneuf du Pape let him reflect on this.

These horny handed sons of the soil have accepted that global change is real.  They have accepted that it is man-made greenhouse gases which cause this warming.

The threat for them is real.

The jewels of our cultural heritage, French wines, elegant and refined, are today in danger, they wrote. 

They went on:

Changes in climate are leaving our vineyards increasingly vulnerable. Summer heat waves, recent hail storms in Bordeaux, new diseases from the South – the disturbances will soon be much more serious.

They said that because of the rise in average temperatures the alcohol content of French wines was increasing.

For piss-heads this might be a good thing, but for most wine drinkers this will be a disaster.  As the winemakers and their friends said:

Our wines could lose their soul.

They were blunt. If no action was taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions then by the end of the century traditional wine growing areas will be over 1000 kilometres away. Champagne from Manchester anyone?

The opinion piece was also a call to action by politicians.

The winemakers painted the Copenhagen conference as one literally holding the future of humanity in its hands.

There had to be an ambitious agreement for industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gases by at least 40 percent from today to 2020.

The time to act is now. If French winemakers can see the bleeding obvious, why can’t Fielding, Turnbull and Rudd?  Too brain addled by CO2 and profit loving polluters perhaps?