photo: Guillaume Souvant/AFP
‘Historic’ bout of frost decimates French winemakers’ harvest
Apr. 11, 2021
French fruit growers and winemakers are warning that the majority of their harvest this year has been lost to this week’s frost.
“No region has been spared: beets, rape, barley, vines fruit trees … All the different kind of support must be activated urgently,” the National Federation of Unions for Farmers (FNSEA) stressed.
“Exceptional situations call for exceptional measures,” it added.
All through the week, farmers across France had tried to save their harvest from the frost by lighting fires and candles.
In the south-eastern départements of Drome and Ardeche, temperatures dropped to as low as -8°C during the nights this week. The mercury has thus fallen by 33°C over 10 days.
Local winemakers and fruit growers reported to the FNSEA that they had lost up about 90 per cent of their harvest.
Continue reading at www.euronews.com
Can French wine survive the climate change fiasco?
Sep. 23, 2019
Winegrowers in the south of France felt the full effect of climate change this June when record 46°C temperatures scorched their vines, cutting their crop by half.
Growers in the Languedoc region are working with the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) to find ways to adapt to a hotter, drier, more unpredictable climate in order to survive.
“This year started off really nicely, a nice lot of flowering, we thought the tank would be very full,” says winegrower Robin Williamson, sloshing about in juice in his wine cellars at the Domaine de Saumarez.
Continue reading at www.rfi.fr
How climate change is souring French winemakers’ 2020 harvest
Aug. 15, 2020
2020 has already been a year to forget for vineyards, as the corona crisis has led to plummeting sales. Now adverse weather conditions are threatening to ruin the harvest.
Just when it seemed the year could not get more awful for French winemakers, it has got worse.
With coronavirus lockdowns sending sales plummeting, some have had to turn their unsold stock into alcoholic hand disinfectant.
This is all the more depressing because 2019 was a vintage year in many of the country’s wine regions.
Continue reading at www.thelocal.fr
Southern France set to sizzle, says new climate change study
Feb. 2, 2021
That dream house in southern France that so many fantasise about is going to become uncomfortably hot in coming decades, according to new climate change projections Monday by the country’s national weather service.
Even if humanity manages to modestly reduce greenhouse gas emissions — which so far has only happened during a raging pandemic or a global recession — France as a whole is on track to heat up nearly three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by about 2070, Meteo France said in a report.
And if carbon pollution continues unabated, average annual temperatures across the nation will, by century’s end, soar 4.5C beyond that benchmark.
Continue reading at www.france24.com
