Ask a winegrower what keeps them awake at night and they’ll tell you it’s climate change. They’d have told you the same thing 10 years ago. For some, particularly those farming in Australia’s warmest regions, the answer was the same 20, even 30 years ago. Wine farmers are acutely attuned to the impacts of climate change because the grapes they grow are hypersensitive to environmental factors. Wine, therefore, can be considered climate change’s canary in the coal mine. If this is the case, keeping that analogy going, Australia’s winegrowers are some of the first miners to notice that something is amiss.
And what is the Australian wine industry doing about it? Australia’s multipronged climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts are some of the most progressive in the world.
