People who make, sell, or enjoy wine have increasing awareness that climate change will affect how and where wine is produced. This is the first general-audience trade book to look at this growing issue in world-wide winemaking. It is neither a polemic on the climate-change debate nor a gloom-and-doom warning that good wine is threatened, but rather a detailed look at the ways in which the world of wine will be altered as our climate changes.

The effects of soil on wine and the other long-reaching effects that climate change will have.

The U.N. predicts the Earth will have more than 9.6 billion people by 2050. With resources already scarce, how will we feed them all? Journalist Lisa Palmer has traveled the world for years, documenting the cutting-edge innovations of people and organizations on the front lines of fighting the food gap.

Anomalous climatic outcomes such as higher temperatures, intense rainfall and flood, frequent and severe droughts are now at the new level. Without appropriate adaptation measures, climate change is bound to exacerbate vulnerability of society, place food security and human health at risk, threaten the lives of growing urban population and impede the goal of attaining sustainable development. The human and social dimensions of climate change, including climate policy, are essential parts of our response to the many challenges emanating from climate change. By focusing on a wide range of topics and involving a diverse array of scholars, this book sheds lights on human and social dimensions of climate change; topics neglected and often poorly understood by scholars and policymakers.

The importance of viticulture and the winemaking socio-economic sector is acknowledged worldwide. The most renowned winemaking regions show very specific environmental characteristics, where climate usually plays a central role. Considering the strong influence of weather and climatic factors on grapevine yields and berry quality attributes, climate change may indeed significantly impact this crop. Recent trends already point to a pronounced increase in growing season mean temperatures, as well as changes in precipitation regimes, which have been influencing wine typicity across some of the most renowned winemaking regions worldwide. Moreover, several climate scenarios give evidence of enhanced stress conditions for grapevine growth until the end of the century. Although grapevines have high resilience, the clear evidence for significant climate change in the upcoming decades urges adaptation and mitigation measures to be taken by sector stakeholders. To provide hints on the abovementioned issues, we have edited a Special Issue entitled “Viticulture and Winemaking under Climate Change”. Contributions from different fields were considered, including crop and climate modeling, and potential adaptation measures against these threats. The current Special Issue allows for the expansion of scientific knowledge in these particular fields of research, as well as providing a path for future research.

Wine has been described as a window into places, cultures and times. Geographers have studied wine since the time of the early Greeks and Romans, when viticulturalists realized that the same grape grown in different geographic regions produced wine with differing olfactory and taste characteristics. This book, based on research presented to the Wine Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, shows just how far the relationship has come since the time of Bacchus and Dionysus. Geographers have technical input into the wine industry, with exciting new research tackling subjects such as the impact of climate change on grape production, to the use of remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems for improving the quality of crops. This book explores the interdisciplinary connections and science behind world viticulture. Chapters cover a wide range of topics from the way in which landforms and soil affect wine production, to the climatic aberration of the Niagara wine industry, to the social and structural challenges in reshaping the South African wine industry after the fall of apartheid. The fundamentals are detailed too, with a comparative analysis of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and chapters on the geography of wine and the meaning of the term ‘terroir’.