Missouri Life October 2023

WINE DOG

Wines of the Future

EVERY FOUR YEARS, THE INSTITUTE OF MASTERS OF WINE hosts a symposium attended by hundreds of wine professionals. The event took place in Wiesbaden, Germany, this past July. As you might imagine, it was an opportunity for all of us to enjoy fantastic, even legendary wines. You’d think that all this global group talked about were those extraordinary wines. Nobody would consider wasting time on the grapes that grow in Missouri. But you’d be wrong. The theme of Symposium 2023 was “A Taste for the Future,” and the focus was on how the wine industry should prepare for climate chaos. Sustainability was the watchword, although it’s a term with no precise meaning (much as “organic” is an ill-defined and quar relsome concept). Several seminars focused on the cli mate catastrophe confronting winemakers around the globe. This year has already seen enough disasters, and the last few years were rife with challenges beyond the usual. Everywhere there’s drought, though Germany’s Ahr Valley was nearly swept away by floods in 2020. Sicily recorded temperatures approaching 120 degrees this summer. France has been bedeviled as well, and 2022 saw the smallest harvest since 1957. So, Masters of Wine discussed whether new grapes in classic regions ought to be the strategy. Only last year, Bordeaux authorized new grapes, including Spain’s Albariño, as a response to global warming. New vineyards are thriving in places we never thought pos sible, whether in Sweden, Poland, Denmark, or most prominently, in England, where a new sparkling wine industry is commanding Champagne-like prices. We didn’t just argue over whether new grapes ought to go in new places. We talked about the industry’s reliance on spraying regimes, such as sulfur, a com pound that we can consider organic and harmless once it is washed away by the rain (or sprinklers, for that matter). In many of the wetter places among the world’s vineyards, a little copper is sometimes mixed in with that sulfur (it’s called the Bordeaux mixture) and it tamps down mildew. Tiny amounts of copper, too, will wash away, but a century or more of adding copper damages the soil, and the long-term health of a vineyard is compromised. Copper, synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals are not sustainable FREEPIK, D. BISHOP

in the long term. The industry has begun to speak of having only 50 or 60 more vintages before the house of cards collapses. One answer is genetic manipulation. Rather than genetic modification (GMO might see the addition and combination of genetic material from different plants), manipulation takes advantage of the same technology that brought us the COVID vaccines. Scientists are dis covering how to turn on the plant’s own latent genes to protect them, obviating the need of pesticides. But will the public believe that those techniques are different from GMO methods? So many of the grains we eat today are GMO, and people might not care about those. But there is something sacrosanct about wine, and we demand that it adhere to purer standards. Finally, the symposium began to ask whether hybrid grapevines, those that were created by crossing native American grapevines with the more famous European vines a century ago, might be the solution we seek. They certainly prosper here in the United States. Grapevines like Seyval Blanc, Vidal Blanc, Chambourcin, and Baco Noir (the names reflect their French origins) or newer grapes like Traminette, Valvin Muscat, Itasca, and hundreds more are less vulnerable to the ravages of extreme weather events. Perhaps even good old Norton could provide the answer. You may not like Missouri’s official state grape, but it’s also being used to create new vines like Crimson Cabernet and Cabernet Doré, and they’re being grown in California as well as here in the Midwest. Where once the grapes we grow here in Missouri were seen as odd and provincial, they are getting a new and fresh look. They just might be the future of wine.

BY DOUG FROST Doug is both a Master of Wine and Master Sommelier, one of only three in the world to achieve both titles. He lives in Kansas City.

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