Savor and Speak Up
Facts: Warmer climate, worse wine 🥵🍷 | Feelings: Enjoy what you have⏳ 🍓| Action: Write your local paper ✍️📰
Welcome to We Can Fix It, where we tackle the climate crisis with facts, feelings, and action. Written by me, climate scientist Kim Nicholas.
Hi friends,
I’m at the Napa RISE wine conference this week, feeling nostalgic for my PhD on wine and climate change. So I’ll share some highlights from that research, plus a reminder to enjoy what we have, and how personal stories of what’s at risk can spark political action. Let’s dive in!
Facts: Warmer climate = worse wine
Climate change is bad for the planet, and bad for your palate. :(
This was the takeaway from my five years of PhD research, which I wrote about for Scientific American.
Winegrapes are especially sensitive to climate. The best wines come from an ideal balance between sugar and acid, with just the right amount of color and flavor.
Under optimal ripening conditions, grapes steadily accumulate sugar and lose acid. At the same time, they’re gently building to peak color and flavor potential.
In warmer weather, grapes ripen too fast. Sugar spikes before flavor and color compounds catch up, leading to higher-alcohol wines that taste hotter and more bitter.
Meanwhile acids, which provide a sharp, refreshing taste (think of a Granny Smith apple), drop too quickly. Excessive heat also reduces pigments that give red wines their color, and tannins, which help wine compliment food and give them texture, like“chewy”.
Most of what we call taste is actually smell, and climate is changing the aroma compounds in wine as well. Over 1,000 aroma compounds have been identified in wine, and many develop late in ripening and are sensitive to heat. Rotundone, the black pepper note in Syrah, builds best in cooler conditions. So hotter vintages mean blander Syrahs.
At Napa RISE this week, I’m hearing creative strategies to adapt to a warming climate: cover crops, solar panels for vineyard shade (vitivoltaics!), and letting vines sprawl to shade the fruit. There’s also a shift away from the big, jammy wines produced by long “hang time,” towards earlier harvests with a fresher wine style. It’s encouraging to be around people working hard to take care of this beautiful place, and keep great wines on our tables.
Feelings: Enjoy What You Have
The climate crisis demands a lot from us to meet this moment in history as the last stewards of humanity’s forever carbon budget.
And! We’ve gotta enjoy this one life we get.
To continue to draw strength for doing the climate work, I’m increasingly focused on enjoying the many good moments, while continuing to face hard truths unflinchingly.
On a walk yesterday, I listened to Vicki Robin narrate Your Money or Your Life. In a section called “The Pleasures of Frugality,” she writes:
Frugality means enjoying what we have.
Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them.
To be frugal means to have a high joy-to-stuff ratio. If you get one unit of joy for each material possession, that’s frugal. But if you need ten possessions to even begin registering on the joy meter, you’re missing the point of being alive.
There’s a word in Spanish that encompasses all this: aprovechar. It means to use something wisely, be it a sunny day at the beach, or leftovers made into a delicious new meal. It means getting full value from life, enjoying all the good that each moment and each thing has to offer. You can aprovecha a simple meal, a bowl of ripe strawberries, or a cruise in the Bahamas. There’s nothing miserly about aprovechar; it’s a succulent word, full of sunlight and flavor.
- Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life, Chapter 6
What are you making the most of these days? Let me know in the comments.
Action: Write Your Local Paper
Is it just me, or has the world gone completely fucking bananas in the last 100 days?
One powerful way to push back to zoom way in. Tell your story of how budget cuts or global geopolitical chaos is affecting YOU or someone you love.
Personal stories shift public opinion, influence leaders, and help change hearts, minds, norms, and culture. In a white paper on the Science of Generosity from the University of California, Berkeley, Summer Allen explains:
“[P]eople are much more likely to help an identified, specific person rather than an abstract or anonymous individual, and they’re more likely to help individuals than groups.”
A study in the United States found more media coverage directly increased public concern for climate change. And elected officials pay close attention to op-eds!
Two effective actions to create media attention:
1. Write an op-ed.
Tell your story to your local paper, focusing on why it matters for your community and the climate.
I’ve heard from friends who are facing laying off one of six employees at their small nonprofit, or had approved projects and halfway-completed research trials cancelled. These stories matter. Sharing them builds political pressure for better decisions.
For tips on writing an op-ed, check out this guide from Protect Our Winters for how to write a climate op-ed. A couple highlights:
Keep the everyday reader in mind.
Direct ties to the community in which you are submitting your op-ed are essential.
Come out swinging with clear statements of your opinion and your authority, credibility, or personal experience that supports your opinion.
Remember to argue for "who should do what, when" in your op-ed. (Thanks to David Malakoff, the International News Editor at Science, for this advice!)
A great step-by-step resource for writing and pitching op-eds is the book Youth to Power by Jamie Margolin.
2. Short on time? Write a Letter to the Editor.
Write 150 words, directly responding to a recent article published by the paper, connecting it to your perspective and a climate angle.
It would really encourage me to read your op-eds. Please share them with me! You can reply directly to this email to reach me, or share in the comments below.
P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to your local paper. We need local journalism, and journalism needs us.
Parting Tidbits
Upcoming talks:
Tomorrow, May 1: In case you’re in/near Napa right now, come to my talk and panel, “Is Regenerative Ag Our Future?”
I’ll join two in-person events for Lund University Sustainability Week next week:
May 7: A climate movement through bodies in movement, workshop with Nanna Nore at 11:00 at LUCSUS (in Swedish).
May 8: 2040 Starts Now, lecture and film screening, 14:00 at Kalmar Nation.
May 19: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Planetary Health Symposium (Invite-only, but get in touch if you’re in Stockholm!)
Recent news
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”
-my advice to the New York Times on “The Best Thing I Can Do For the Planet.”
Book Recommendation
Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy. I devoured this novel in a couple of days. It’s a tense, compelling story about family, love, trust, ethics, and obligation, and the writing is so beautiful. Asks important questions about the role of people in keeping wild places wild, and how we relate to nature as it gets more volatile. And made me laugh out loud with surprise. SO GOOD!
xo,
Kim
What (am I) making the most of these days? Effecting positive change in my professional practice(s) across the social-environmental-climate justice spaces. Like, things I will never fully achieve, but working so hard and in a position (finally) to possibly do on some level.
Sorry, sounds grandiose!
Appreciating precious head-shake-moments from our younger daughter before she goes off to school, like, when you get wet feet as she’s constantly leaving ice cubes on the kitchen floor… :D
PS Love the high joy-to-stuff ratio and the op-ed primer. :)