Warm weather in media

The warming got it's popular breakthrough this year. Here and there anyway.

An article from the Washington Post some weeks ago covers, how the warming leaves its marks in Northern France. This year the grapeharvest was the earliest ever. A winegrower from Alsace explains, how he finds it necessary to experiment growing other grape varieties, more fit for warm weather than for instance Pinot Noir and Gewurztraminer.

I don't have the general view of 11 generations of winegrowers, but occasionally I manage to come up with questions, that provides me interesting answers.

Shortly after my arrival here in 2003 I had hardly had time to be homesick before messengers, wellknown to me, arrived. Flights of starlings, thousands, tens of thousands, dived and circled above the vineyards opposite my mother-in-laws farm in the Côte des Blancs, Champagne. And they were hungry after the long flight, all the way from Scandinavia, 1000 kilometers further north.

She explained me, how in the old days she and her parents had to cover the grapes with big nets to protect them against the hunger of the migrating birds. Since the grapeharvest advanced so many weeks, that the necessary grapes were already harvested at the arrival of the migration. Thus the nets became superfluous, and they haven't left the now uninhabited childhome of my mother-in-law since. (More here.)

I didn't allow myself to think global warming at that time. I just always remembered, that the weather has become warmer, while lots of people still remember, how it was once different. The most incredible thing: No one seems to have talked about it. Anyway, I've never heard of such discussions!

This seems to have changed during 2007.