Napa Wine Quality may Suffer Climate Change According to a study
conducted by researchers at the Stanford University in
California, there could be 50% less land suitable for
cultivating premium wine grapes in high-value areas of Northern
California even as some cooler parts of Oregon and Washington
state would become correspondingly better for growing grapes,
writes Subhash Arora with divergent viewpoints expressed by
experts like Cakebread, Torres and Pancho Campo MW, and yet all
recognizing the results of the study and pointing in the same
direction. The researchers examined climate change over the next
30 years of four wine-growing areas Napa Valley and Santa
Barbara County in California, Yamhill County in Willamette
Valley in Oregon and Walla Walla in Columbia Valley in
Washington. Taking the premium wine grape suitability in the
western USA including Napa Valley as an illustrative case study,
the research focused on the evaluation in the near-term period
years 2000–39. The report finds that ‘the projecte