Letters

The Wine Industry’s ‘greater commitment to mitigating climate change’ (‘A Month in Wine’, September 2018) is commendable, but I wonder if it could play a further and possibly more important role. There are a handful of politicians in critical decision-making positions who still view climate change as some sort of conspiracy theory or hoax. Could the wine industry play a crucial role in convincing these last bastions of denial that this is really happening? Producers around the globe are in possession of a plethora of data spanning decades, detailing temperatures, residual sugar, rainfall, harvest conditions, alcohol levels, phenolic ripeness… the list goes on. I can’t think of any industry, agricultural or otherwise, which could be a better barometer of our changing climate than the wine industry. Alexander Chapman, Wirral, UK