An article from 2008 does NOT tell of an actual grape apopacalyse in Australia due to Global Warming. In fact, there is NO evidence that any of this supposition ever actually happened. The background is that the Wine Industry in Aus. is relatively NEW and strong. And it takes a couple decades to PROVE which areas can produce. So a NEW industry is gonna have some failures predicting WHERE wine grapes will grow.
Um....would I be right in guessing you have not been to Australia?
The industry dates back around a century, if not longer. It is by no means a young industry on the global scale; not by any means.
The FACT is that grapes have been produced in NSW and Victoria for more than a century, and are now being ploughed under because climate change and drought have made the industry economically unsustainable in some areas.
The industry in New Zealand, for instance, is much younger, but has never planted land and then ploughed it under as part of the experimentation you suggest. These days soil science make such experimentation largely unnecessary, and on the contrary allows more and more land to be used for winemaking.
Except for the impact of climate change.
btw, Winemaking is also being hit in Spain and to a less extent South Africa and Argentina. These are old industries, and not known for planning errors.
As for 2008:
"In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it did not receive sufficient water by October of that year. In Tasmania drought conditions worsened in 2008, with many areas reporting no significant rainfall for three years"
Then in 2009:
"In 2009, drought conditions in South East Australia continued, after one of the driest summers for the region."
