The Wines They Are A-Changin’

The NYT has an article on how hybrid grape varieties are gaining importance in the fight against climate change.

“The climate crisis has affected wine regions with a speed and force beyond what anybody had predicted. In addition to global warming, wine regions have experienced more frequent catastrophic weather events, like hail, drought and spring frosts, along with devastating bouts with fungal diseases and insect infestations. …

“To say hybrids have hit the mainstream would be an exaggeration. It’s just scattered farmers here and there, in France, Germany, New Zealand and Virginia, for example, who are joining growers in regions like Vermont, the Midwest and parts of Canada, where the weather, either too hot and humid or too cold, required alternatives to vinifera grapes. But even the world’s most historic wine regions like Champagne and Burgundy are beginning tentative experiments with hybrids in their effort to adapt to the changing climate.”

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Supply chain crunch hitting farmers

The NYT: “The same congestion at U.S. ports and shortage of truck drivers that have brought the flow of some goods to a halt have also left farmers struggling to get their cargo abroad and fulfill contracts before food supplies go bad. Ships now take weeks, rather than days, to unload at the ports, and backed-up shippers are so desperate to return to Asia to pick up more goods that they often leave the United States with empty containers rather than wait for American farmers to fill them up.”

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Expertise? We don’t stinking expertise!

“Since the move, the agency has lost decades of expertise on a wide range of subjects, from climate change to antibiotic resistance, from rural economies to organic farming, leaving numerous projects in limbo and severely bottlenecking new research. Today, conversations between The Counter and more than 20 former and current ERS employees reveal that staff morale has plummeted. Many also assert that the agency is failing to live up to its mission due to severe understaffing and lack of stable leadership.”

That’s OK. All they ever did was kill trees by publishing reports.

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