Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
We have talked about this before on the blog, but wineries continue to be a great leading indicator for our changing climate. Above is a chart from the Financial Times showing the official start dates of vendange for two wine regions in France. The Champagne region is further north and so the harvest dates naturally tend to be a bit later compared to the Rhône region. But in both cases, we seem to be seeing a shift to about a month earlier: September instead of October and August instead of September. And the turning point, at least according to this data, appears to have been 1987. The winemakers interviewed in this article appear confident that they can continue to adapt and find ways to deliver wonderful bottles of wine. But of course, that is not what you should be worrying about when you see this chart.
Last year over the holidays, I attended a virtual wine tasting event that was put on by one of our partners. It was with a vineyard / winemaker in Spain and so it was evening for us and some ungodly hour for him.
At the end of the tasting — which was exceptional, by the way — I asked him what he thought about the Niagara region. Some of you may know that I love to support local Ontario wines. His response was hilarious and something along the lines of: “When we think of Niagara wines, we think of a part of the world that shouldn’t produce wine but somehow does.”
Ouch.
This was maybe the case before. But I think the region, vines, and industry have all matured. We also have some exceptional winemakers, some of which have come from the Old World because our startup-y wine region affords them far more creative freedom.
But you might also argue that things are changing because our climate is changing. The Financial Times recently published an interesting “big read” about how agricultural production and crop types are shifting around the world in the face of climate temperatures.
It turns out that wine grapes are a pretty good leading indicator. A canary in the coal mine if you will. Because climate matters a great deal if you’re trying to make exceptional wines. And if you’ve been harvesting a particular thing at a certain time for the last 5 decades and you’re now doing it several weeks earlier, it might be a sign that something is changing.
It also turns out that two countries, in particular, stand to disproportionately benefit from this shifting agricultural landscape: Canada and Russia. As temperatures change, a new agricultural frontier is going to be created. And it is expected that more than 50% of this land will be in these two countries. See image at the top of this post.
Of course, there’s a flipside to this change. Countries on the other end of the spectrum with marginal growing climates and/or low production yields, could be severely impacted by higher temperatures. So perhaps it is a good idea to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of wine. Might I recommend something from Niagara?
Bloomberg is running a video series right now called Next Jobs. It is a look at the careers of the future. Episode four is about a vertical farmer named Katie Morich and a startup called Bowery Farming, which does this out of a nondescript building in New Jersey.
The video focuses more on Katie’s life and less on vertical farming. But it did introduce me to Bowery Farming, which I am intrigued by. So I thought I would share both the video and the company. It is a compelling pitch: local production; ideal conditions; no pesticides; and software that optimizes it all.
If you’re a regular reader of ATC, you might remember that last month the team at TAS planted 100 EarthBoxes on the roof of our office building to grow everything from beets to hot peppers. Well it has now been over a month, so I thought it would be interesting to show you the progress that has been made.
May 16, 2014
June 27, 2014
The area we’re occupying on the roof is probably around 400 square feet and many of the EarthBoxes have already been harvested a few times. So it just goes to show you how little you need to grow quite a bit of food. Now imagine what we could do if we transformed all of our urban rooftops.
