WHEN NATURE VENTS WRATH ON GRAPES

Making wine is a tough job in most places, what with frost, hail, drought and bushfires to contend with. But nowhere is the task bigger than in Argentina’s Mendoza region, where vintners duel “the whole gamut of natural hazards” — not least frequent earthquakes, according to research unveiled on Wednesday. The region tops a new index of wine areas most targeted by Nature’s wrath. “We see that Mendoza in Argentina, which has earthquakes, hail, floods, the whole gamut of natural hazards... Is number one,” said James Daniell of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who helped compile the new data. Second and third were Georgia and Moldova, “countries that obviously have smaller GDPs but the percentage of their GDP due to wine is very, very high,” he said. Northwestern Slovenia came in at number four, and Japan’s Yaraqui Valley took fifth place on the Global Wine Risk Index. It was compiled by a team of geophysicists, geoscientists, meteorologists and economists using data on wine industry losses due to natural hazards going back to 1900. The atlas covers 110,000 wineries in 131 countries producing about 26 billion litres every year, said Daniell. The industry is estimated to directly contribute $300 billion (275 billion euros) to the world economy annually. But “it’s a highly vulnerable industry,” said Daniell — with about 10 percent of wine production lost to natural hazards every year at an estimated loss of $10 billion. Over five years up to 2016, hail costs winemakers in France’s famous Burgundy region as much as 50 per cent of their crops, according to the research. In 2010, Chile lost 125 million litres of wine to a monster quake. Just last week, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Hungary suffered frost that could claim 30 per cent — up to 60 per cent in some parts — of crops. —