| Vineyards in Priorat, Tarragona |
SPAIN (Agencies) At the Third World Congress on Climate Change and Wine, held in Marbella last month, experts came to the conclusion that the grape variety known as "garnacha" in Spanish, or "grenache" in French, will be vital if Mediterranean wineries are to adapt to harsher climate conditions. Just a few months earlier, experts at a wine summit in Barbastro - the capital of the Aragonese wine-producing region of Somontano - had reached a similar conclusion, and issued several warnings. For one thing, they said, wines will have a higher alcohol content (in some cases this has already happened, going from 10 to 11 percent, and from 14 to 14.5 percent). But their natural acidity will also be lower, some reds will lose their color, others will lose their flavor, many whites will be deprived of their typical qualities, and there may be a greater proportion of reds to whites. Against this extreme scenario, analysts said that indigenous grapes would resist better than imports.>>>
