Winegrowers are nothing if not adaptable, given that the grape is a harbinger crop, or in more prosaic terms, the canary in the coal mine for agriculture. As a result, when climate shifts generate more frequent heat waves of higher temperatures and longer duration, viticulturists swing into action with a toolbox of methods to mitigate the effects.  Growers use misters to cool the air around the grapes, irrigate in advance of heat waves to prevent dehydration, and even apply anti-transpirants that work like sunscreen to protect from sun damage. Medium-term options include changing canopy management to delay ripening and using regenerative farming techniques to boost water retention in the soil.  The most aggressive strategies involve relocating vineyards to cooler microclimates or pulling up and replacing less heat-tolerant varietals. However, vineyard owners are unlikely to invest in these approaches while consumption and demand are declining.  A better alternative wou

History Drunk Turtle is a family-owned company led by the Brini family and located in Pontedera, Tuscany, Italy. The company was founded in 2014 by a group of wine industry professionals, architects, and engineers who repurposed an ancient Roman concrete recipe: "Cocciopesto" for building wine fermentation and maturation vessels called Opus. The name Drunk Turtle is derived from Italy's Slow food movement, the extremely hard shell of a turtle and the love for wine. Today The Brini family are now the sole owners of the company and are also involved in the wine industry with their family winery: Il Conventino, located in Montepulciano, Italy, and their Tuscan gin brand: Ginepraio. Through years of research and development with the University of Pisa, Drunk Turtle has perfected their Cocciopesto recipe and currently produces more than 200 Opus a year which are sold predominantly in France, Italy, and other important winemaking countries. Material - Cocciopesto Cocciopest

Afternoon Brief, August 17th

New Sweet Spot for Direct Wine Sales: Consumers buying direct from wineries are trading up, but Napa is still too expensive for them...

While associated with fun and frivolity, sparkling wine is a complex wine of many moving parts that requires serious skill to make. We catch up with some of the leading lights in the fizz industry, from Champagne, Spain and England, to find out the secrets of their craft and the challenges surrounding creating a consistent sparkling wine style in an ever-changing climate. Synonymous with celebration, sparkling wines are easy to enjoy but challenging to create. Crafting quality fizz requires a skilled hand, well-trained nose, razor-sharp intuition and nerves of steel come harvest time, when deciding on the perfect moment to pick feels like a game of Russian roulette. Cellar masters are the wizards of the wine world, able to create a consistent style of wine each year from hundreds of elements amid increasingly erratic weather conditions. They have to be time travellers too, projecting themselves into the future when tasting aggressively acidic base wines, working out how they will harmo

Afternoon Brief, July 19th

Wildfires Rage Across Wine-Growing Southwestern France, Arson Suspected: Wildfires raged across the Gironde winegrowing area of southwestern France on Tuesday, where a man has been taken into custody suspected of arson, authorities said...