Grape Expectations: A Family's Vineyard Adventure in France

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There’s Trudie and the couple’s business partner, the oenologist Riccardo Cotarella, sitting at a table tasting their wares while Sting sits on a wall behind, preferring to watch and play with his little guitar.

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We originally mentioned a new wine merchants coming to Marlow two weeks ago, and we now have all the details direct from the new business – Grape Expectations! Our distribution portfolios are split between products sourced from the Grape Expectations Direct Import Portfolio, and those from US-based wineries and importers.According to these projections, by midcentury Bordeaux could reach the upper temperature limits for growing red varieties, and will fall outside the ideal climate for its white grapes. Other areas are threatened too. Last year an international team of scientists showed that by 2050, some of the world’s most famous wine-making regions, including Tuscany in Italy, will shrink by nearly 70 percent. Microbiologist David Mills, who directed the study, says that ultimately, these microbes help in the fermentation process, but they can also affect the wine’s taste. Weather-related events are probably driving some of the year-to-year changes in the grapes’ microbial communities seen in the study, Mills says. Though the team did not set out to look at climate change, “I would argue that climate change itself is going to have an impact” on the quality of wine grapes, he says. Exactly what that impact might be is still unclear. Toasting the future

Grape Expectations Magazine | Issue 18 by GrapeExpectation

It’s not an easy task. Although scientists have developed fungus-resistant varieties using traditional plant-breeding techniques, cross-breeding compromises the quality of the grape. “If you make a cross using traditional breeding techniques, you don’t get anything that resembles the original parent grape in terms of flavor or taste,” Gray says. These geographic shifts will keep the wine flowing, but may bring new pressures on wildlife and other natural resources such as water, says climatologist Lee Hannah of Conservation International’s Moore Center for Ecosystem Science and Economics. When Hannah and his team looked at the conservation implications of the wine industry’s geographic overhaul, they were “stunned,” he says, by the magnitude of changes that could come over the next few decades. Then he hit Sting where it hurts: in his throbbing spiritual core. “I wish for Sting that the karma so dear to him does not turn against him and I invite him to reflect on the truth of the facts in the course of his meditations.” Creating the ideal conditions for growing quality wine grapes is, as Jones puts it, a multibillion dollar issue. Though there’s not one perfect environment for grapes, there is a well-known range of characteristics that growers look for. Grapevines hate wet feet and do best in arid areas where temperatures don’t dip below 12˚ or 13˚ Celsius during the growing season, or spike above 22˚ C. Sunlight is important too. As a vine’s leaves soak up sunshine, the light fuels photosynthesis, which fills the grapes with sugars. After fermentation, these sugars become alcohol. Bespoke gifts from the world of wine and spirits that can cater for both the corporate consumer and special occasions such as birthdays and anniversariesIn some areas of France, Busalacchi says, wine producers refer to climate change as le bon problème, or the good problem. Tipping a delicate balance And, by changing the grapes’ resident microbes, such shifts may more directly alter wine. In a study led by scientists at the University of California, Davis, researchers collected 273 samples of pressed grapes from California wineries in Napa, Sonoma and San Joaquin counties as well as from along the Central Coast. The researchers analyzed DNA fragments in the samples to show that the microbial populations varied from region to region, even on the same variety of grape. The findings, published in the Jan. 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that factors such as heat and humidity had an important influence on the type of microbes that colonize a grape’s surface. Climate researchers simulated how the quality of cabernet sauvignon grown in Western Australia will change by 2070. Using low- and high-warming scenarios, the team predicted declines in acidity and the concentration of a compound called anthocyanin, which gives red wine color. The focus of our Direct Import Portfolio efforts are with European wine, but we import directly from most other major regions in the world as well.