Page 1252 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 7 May 2014
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The spread of more than 33 wineries located within 30 minutes of Canberra also gives us a tourism opportunity. It enables us to showcase a side of Canberra where the rural ambience and small-scale cellar door operations with their innate intimacy offer a counterweight to the magnificent national cultural institutions surrounding Lake Burley Griffin.
The Canberra region is renowned for cool climate wines. What will then be the effect of climate change and global warming? The two to three degrees change predicted would irrevocably change the climate characteristics, the grapes grown and the wine made. Climate change is very serious business for the Australian wine industry, with recent reports of wine companies buying land in Tasmania not for what they can grow there now but for what they can grow in the future.
I attended a seminar the other month at ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society on supply and demand of future climate change information for adaptation in the Australian wine-grape sector. The researcher was Ms Miriam Dunn, a PhD student at the ANU. Her thesis explores a disconnect between users and providers of climate change information within viticulture. In other words users—grape growers, winemakers and the wine industry—need climate change information which may not be produced by the providers—environmental scientists—in a form which is useful for short or long-term decision making.
Her subjects for interview and survey—the research used a mixed methods approach—were across Australian winemaking regions and also from overseas. They included an interview sample of Canberra district viticulturists, giving us a direct insight into our local situation.
She found that the information required by Canberra winegrowers for short-term decision making—less than 12 months—was for great detail about rainfall, humidity and temperature—detail at the one to 10 kilometres grid level. Long-term decision-making required much coarser information—regional is sufficient—presented as homoclimes. A homoclime is a region climatically similar to another region. For instance, the success of tempranillo in the Canberra district has been predicted by climate similarities with Ribera del Duero, Spain, where tempranillo is the major grape variety grown. Canberra and Ribera del Duero are homoclimes.
What the Canberra wine industry wants to know for long-term decision-making is: what will the regional climate be like here in the coming decades, specifically the next 10 or 20 years? Will it be like Mudgee or the Hunter or somewhere else? This then allows them to use current knowledge from those homoclimes to make those long-term decisions.
NARCliM, a collaboration between the ACT and New South Wales governments and climate researchers, aims to produce regional climate projections that will support decision making in health, utilities and agriculture, including viticulture. A recent briefing to me on the work of NARCliM indicated that the need of grape growers and winemakers for information presented in a useful format will commence shortly. I am proud that our ACT government is part of the NARCliM funding consortium to deliver climate change information for our regional community.
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