Welcome back with us this morning.
If you drink Washington wine,
you're taking part in a tradition
more than a century old,
and even if you don't,
you're probably reaping the benefits.
So take a look.
Those areas that you see where grape
vines are fertile ground for Washington's
$8 billion wine industry. Today.
There are more than 1000 wineries
producing more wine than any
state other than California.
But warming temperatures threaten to
turn that culture and that benefit
to ash in our tipping point coverage,
KING5's Angelique.
OK, went to Yakima Valley to talk
to grape growers about how climate
change is impacting the crops.
Angela good morning.
Yeah Jacob, maybe if you head to Yakima
Valley there are less than 100 wineries
that cover 12,000 Vineyard Acres.
It's a small community with
different views on climate change.
Dustin Tobin and his crews at Precept
Wine brands are using the winter
months to remove grape vines that
no longer produce quality fruit.
Pulling the vines out one by
one from the ground they were
planted in the early 1990s.
Around the time grape growing
became popular in the region,
California is looking at
us like you guys are nuts.
It's way too cold up here.
Once considered too cold,
rising temperatures have forced
winegrowers to adjust between 1895
and 2011, the Pacific Northwest
warmed by about 1.3 degrees.
It's how we react to the weather,
and we try and react on a proactive way.
They're learning to work with a limited
water supply during extreme heat, like the
record breaking highs seen last summer,
we just rotated the water.
Every six hours, what got water
on a Monday from noon to six?
Which is the hottest part of the day?
Got water on Tuesday from 6:00 PM to midnight
wine grapes don't need a lot of water.
About a third less than apples,
but winemaking is as much of
an art as it is a science.
Each grape grower reacting to
climate change differently.
We're hiding the fruit with the canopy.
We didn't used to do that.
We used to expose it.
RRO orientation is changing a little bit.
**** Boucher has been growing wine
grapes in Yakima Valley for 41 years.
I never experienced 150
degrees in my life. He
worries even with water management,
warmer temperatures in the mountains
means even less water stored as snow
impacting the reservoirs surfacing.
The Yakima Valley, like the
ones seen along I-90. Nothing's
been built since before World War Two,
and yet there's way more
water demand and it some.
Point that's going to catch up with us
while harvest was down by 25% last year.
Cherries 20% and apples at least 5%.
Some experts say the biggest threat.
Is still to come
last year. Washington saw
1191 DNR fires the most in
the past ten years, the number of
fires and the amount of smoke has
definitely become most intense.
Doctor Wade Wolfe says the result
is smoked ate it kind of gives
the wine a ashtray like or cigar.
But type character
last fall, Washington State
University announced it was part
of a $7.6 million grant to study
smoke taint and its impact on wine.
Teaming up with scientists
up and down the West
Coast, there were fires in California,
Oregon and Washington going
on simultaneously. But that
research is new and it could take time
for scientists to find solutions.
Leaving winemakers worried whether
your glass is half empty or half full,
the taste could be different.
Now Doctor Wolf told me the goal moving
forward is to keep adapting well,
still producing a commercial quality crop.
Something he says is getting harder
to do every year in the studio,
Angelika Rachel sent it to you.
Well, I was going to say Angela, I mean,
one of the interesting things about this is,
I mean, the change in climate
effects up and down the West Coast.
And of course the huge wine
growing industry in California.
Some of those grapes down there
because of their being even
warmer than Washington state is.
I've had to shift farther to the north,
and I know that there's been
a lot of experimentation.
I saw it as recent as.
Or as long ago as maybe about 10
years ago where there was some
former Boeing employees that Boeing
winemaking clubs found a lot of wine
makers in the state of Washington,
and they were experimenting.
They had these huge plots where
they were trying shading the
grapes and this sort of thing,
so finding ways of adapting to
the change the the harder one
is probably going to be adapting
to the problems of smoke because
that's everywhere and it's really
hard to protect the grapes from
it. Yeah, and that's exactly
what Doctor Wolf said.
He he said that his biggest concern
is the wildfires, because it's new.
This has been developing in
the last four or five years,
so anything that's that's the
fear of the unknown, right?
They don't know how to
deal with it irrigation.
They've kind of managed the temperatures.
They've kind of managed with the
wildfire is still a wild card.
That's absolutely true.
Well, and that's part of
it with climate change.
It's coming, it's here,
and we're learning to it.