Global wine production set a new record last year, so climate alarmists are focusing on a dip in production in the world’s 18th largest wine producer – Greece – to claim a climate-change wine crisis. This latest concocted scare illustrates just how desperate climate alarmists are to perpetuate their climate delusion.
A September 3rd Google News search for “climate change” yielded among the very top results an article by EuroNews titled, “Climate change hits Greek wine as grape harvest falls 30%.” (https://www.euronews.com/2019/09/02/watch-climate-change-hits-greek-wine-as-grape-harvest-falls-30) The article claims, “Climate change is creating new challenges for Greek wine producers. The grape harvest is down 30 per cent since 2018 and 50 per cent from 2017.” The article later claims, “The wine industry worldwide has been rocked by the effects of climate change, with grape quality and vineyard production immediately impacted by the slightest change of temperature.”
We at CFACT have grown to be quite skeptical of alarmist climate claims, including the few that assert specific factual data that appear at first glance to back them up. So we decided to look further into whether climate change is decimating wine production.
The first thing we noted is that Greece is merely the 18th largest wine producer, just barely ahead of Ukraine and Moldovia (https://aroundtheworldin80harvests.com/2018/07/30/wine-production-by-country/). So assuming there has really been a decrease in Greek wine production during the past two years, that is hardly evidence of global climate change or global wine production trends.
The reason why alarmists and their media allies are focusing on Greece instead of other nations or global production as a whole became quickly apparent when we examined global wine production. Global wine production set a new record last year (https://www.foodbusinessafrica.com/2019/04/17/global-wine-production-on-record-high-italy-remains-largest-producer/). Even more remarkably, wine production set a new record despite a steady decline during the past five years in the amount of planted vineyards (https://www.foodbusinessafrica.com/2019/04/17/global-wine-production-on-record-high-italy-remains-largest-producer/). Fewer acres of vineyards yielding record total production is astonishingly good news for wine production.
Putting a further dent in the narrative that global warming is decimating wine production, it was an unusual amount of frost events in 2017 that made 2017 a disappointing year for global wine production (https://italianwinecentral.com/top-fifteen-wine-producing-countries/). A warming climate, of course, will reduce the frequency of frost events. To save face for the alarmist warming narrative, the media delicately described the 2017 cold and frost events as “extreme weather events which resulted in premature harvests.” (https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2019/04/15/Global-wine-production-reaches-record-level) Well, we guess that is one way to describe a cold autumn and early frost events in a way that readers will draw in incorrect inference that global warming was responsible for the disappointing 2017 harvest.
So global wine yields and overall wine production are setting new records. Alarmists respond by searching hard for some country … any country … even a country as inconsequential as merely the 18th largest producer, to find lower production and nefariously scare wine drinkers around the world into believing a false narrative that global warming is threatening their beloved wine.
And alarmists wonder why so many people no longer listen to their concocted alarms….