withering once again?

146 Pages·2015·7.33 MB·English

W O A ?
ITHERING NCE GAIN
A COMPARISON OF ADAPTATION RESPONSES TO
PAST AND PRESENT VITICULTURAL CRISES IN LA RIOJA, SPAIN

Alexander Healey

Submitted to the Department of Environmental Studies of Amherst College in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with honors.

Faculty Advisor:
Rick López

Faculty Readers:
Edward Melillo
Anna Martini

April 10th, 2015
“Vino, enséñame el arte de ver mi propia historia”
—
“Wine, teach me the art of seeing my own history”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Soneto del Vino”

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES AND ABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................... IV
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... V
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................... VI
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY & CHAPTER ORGANIZATION ........................................................... 4
I. WHY WINE, WHY PHYLLOXERA, AND WHY LA RIOJA? ......................................... 12
THE PROJECTED EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE UPON THE WINE INDUSTRY ......................... 13
PHYLLOXERA: A PRECEDENT VITICULTURAL CRISIS ............................................................... 19
LA RIOJA: AN IDEAL REGIONAL CASE STUDY .......................................................................... 23
II. VITICULTURE IN LA RIOJA BEFORE PHYLLOXERA .............................................. 27
VITICULTURE IN LA RIOJA BEFORE THE EARLY MODERN ERA ................................................. 28
THE RISE OF WINEMAKING IN LA RIOJA: 1500-1700 ................................................................ 29
EXPORTATION AND EXPERIMENTATION: 1700-1850 ................................................................. 32
RAPID ASCENSION TO INTERNATIONAL PROMINENCE: 1850-1900 ........................................... 40
III. THE VINE BLIGHT PHYLLOXERA IN LA RIOJA: ANTICIPATORY MEASURES
AND ADAPTIVE RESPONSES ................................................................................................. 46
THE SPANISH PREPARE FOR CATASTROPHE .............................................................................. 47
EARLY EFFORTS TO PREPARE IN LA RIOJA ................................................................................ 50
PHYLLOXERA APPROACHES AS THE COMISIÓN DE DEFENSA DESCENDS INTO DYSFUNCTION . 55
NEW VOICES ATTEMPT TO RENEW A CALL FOR ACTION .......................................................... 57
PHYLLOXERA ARRIVES IN LA RIOJA ......................................................................................... 62
A SLOW AND DIFFICULT RECOVERY ......................................................................................... 69
IV. ASSESSING CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN LA RIOJA THROUGH AN
HISTORICAL LENS ................................................................................................................... 73
SOURCES OF INFORMATION & THE RECEPTIVENESS OF GRAPE GROWERS ............................... 73
IDENTIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE’S EFFECTS & PERCEIVING FUTURE VULNERABILITY ........... 84
ASSESSING OPENNESS TO ADAPTATION .................................................................................... 93
GOVERNMENTAL AND REGULATORY RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN LA RIOJA .......... 109
V. TERROIR, REGIONAL APPELLATIONS, AND ADAPTATION ................................. 115
THE ORIGINS & REGULATORY MANIFESTATIONS OF TERROIR ............................................... 116
REGIONAL APPELLATIONS & CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION .............................................. 120
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 128
APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................ 130
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 134

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LIST OF FIGURES AND ABBREVIATIONS
FIGURES
Figure 1: Difficulty of implementation versus efficacy of adaptation strategies ...............10
Figure 2: The viticultural suitability of global wine regions by 2050 ...............................15
Figure 3: Climatic shifts in global wine regions by 2070 ..................................................17
Figure 4: The spread of phylloxera throughout Europe .....................................................22
Figure 5: The spread of phylloxera throughout Spain .......................................................23
Figure 6: A map of the La Rioja denominación de origen calificada (DOC) ...................26
Figure 7: Riojan wine production between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries ...........32
Figure 8: Adaptation strategies featured in La Plaga Filoxérica ......................................53
Figure 9: An advertisement for American rootstalks .........................................................66
Figure 10: Riojan wine exports during the late nineteenth century ...................................71
Figure: 11: Portrait of Don Manuel Quintano ..................................................................101
Figure 12: A visual representation of the component aspects of terroir .........................119
Figure 13: The growth of vineyard acreage in La Rioja 1990-2012 ................................132
Figure 14: The growth of wine sales in La Rioja 1990-2012 ..........................................132
Figure 15: Vineyard plantings in La Rioja by grape varietal ...........................................133

ABBREVIATIONS
AOC: Appellation d’origine contrôlée
AVA: American Viticultural Area
DOC: Denominación de origen calificada
DOCG: Denominazione di origine controllata e garantita
DOCo: Denominación de origen controlada
GI: Geographic Indication

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ABSTRACT
Using the winemaking industry in La Rioja, Spain as a case study, this thesis
demonstrates that an agricultural community’s experience adapting to a past impending
agricultural crisis can be used as a lens for the assessment of its present efforts to
preemptively adapt to climate change. I juxtapose Riojan viticulturists’ experience with
change climate change to their nineteenth-century predecessors’ experience with a vine
blight called phylloxera. In both cases, Riojan grape growers had or will have the
appropriate time and information needed to formulate and implement an effective
adaptation strategy.
After providing a brief history of viticulture in La Rioja, this thesis draws upon
provincial archival sources to craft the first English-language account of Riojan grape
growers’ experience adapting to phylloxera. I conclude that the Riojans’ ultimately-
lackluster response was a result of local officials’ inability to make adaptation measures
affordable, which exacerbated local skepticism about and disinterest in adaptation.
Next, I provide a narrative of contemporary Riojan winemakers’ climate change
adaptation efforts, which I base upon evidence from a series of on-site personal
interviews with viticulturists. As I relate this narrative, I compare this present adaptation
response to analogous examples of adaptation from the phylloxera era. Through this
comparison, I show that today’s Riojans are much more likely to achieve a successful
adaptation outcome than their nineteenth-century counterparts due to their increased
belief in the threat posed by their respective crisis – climate change – and to their greater
openness to the adaptation of their viticultural practices in response to this crisis.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you…

…to Mom, to Dad, to Ave, and to the rest of my family for oh-so-many things, but
especially for fostering my (probably concerningly precocious) interest in wine, its
creation, and its consumption

…to my advisor, Rick López, for giving me this incredible chance to explore my
interests, and for your invaluable guidance and editing along the way

…to my readers, Ted Melillo and Anna Martini, for your continued mentorship and
enthusiastic support of my academic pursuits

…to the many other members of the Amherst College faculty who have helped me to
develop my thoughts surrounding this project over the past several months

…to Amherst College, for its generous Alpha Delta Phi grant, without which this project
would not have been possible

…to Hugo Caraballo at Milton Academy, for sparking my interest in the Spanish
language, and for tolerating my presence in his classroom for three years in a row

…to the staff of Kenwood Vineyards, for showing me how it’s made and for answering
all of my naïve questions

…to my interviewees in La Rioja for being kind enough to briefly let me into their
fascinating world, and of course for all the wine

…to coffee, which is my second favorite beverage

…to my friends, for not giving me too hard of a time about recently spending most of my
waking hours working on this thesis

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INTRODUCTION
There is consensus within the academic community that global climate change is
occurring, and that regions the world over are expected to experience higher average
temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and more intense weather events.1 While
these changes will produce far-reaching economic and social consequences in the years to
come, individuals who rely upon agriculture for their livelihoods will grapple sooner and
more directly with the effects of climate change than most others. While agriculturists in
some regions may benefit from future changes in temperature and precipitation, those in
many other regions will suffer.2 Whether farmers in regions that climate change will
soon negatively affect will adapt their agricultural practices in response to this impending
crisis and how they will do so are, in the broadest sense, the questions that underlie this
thesis.
In hopes of averting a global agricultural crisis caused by climate change,
researchers from a range of academic disciplines have recently attempted to determine
how to prompt agriculturists to preemptively adapt their production strategies.3 Yet, as
work within this nascent branch of interdisciplinary study has commenced, researchers
have wrestled with a curiously basic problem: How should one approach the study of
climate change adaptation? In 2010, Susanne Moser and Julia Ekstrom, who respectively

1 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change,” accessed April 5,
2015, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/basics/.
2 H. Charles J. Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion
People,” Science 327, no. 5967 (February 12, 2010): 818; and Alvaro Calzadilla et al.,
“Climate Change Impacts on Global Agriculture,” Climatic Change 120, no. 1–2
(September 2013): 374.
3 S. Mark Howden et al., “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 50 (December 11,
2007): 19691.
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study Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Public Policy at
the University of California, Berkeley, authored an article that attempted to provide an
answer to this question in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this
article, the two authors concluded that further “comparative investigations” that
incorporate perspectives from various academic disciplines, sectors, and regions were
needed to more effectively contextualize and assess climate change adaptation efforts
throughout the world.4 Yet, while researchers hailing from fields ranging from sociology
to ecology have since contributed their expertise to the study of climate change
adaptation, voices from the Environmental History discipline have been notably absent
from this academic discourse.
Environmental historians can certainly provide valuable contributions to the
ongoing multi-disciplinary efforts to study climate change adaptation. In this thesis, I
demonstrate that this is the case by showing how the examination of a given agricultural
sector’s experience with adapting to a past crisis can provide insight regarding that same
sector’s present experience with adapting to climate change. Although an example of
past adaptation to a prior agricultural crisis has never before been used as a comparative
framework for the study of climate change adaptation, environmental historian Donald
Worster has eloquently laid the theoretical foundations for such an exercise. In his article
titled “Nature and the Disorder of History,” Worster claims, “Our study of the past
reveals models of successful adaptation that we can learn from today.”5 Historical cases,

4 Susanne C. Moser and Julia A. Ekstrom, “A Framework to Diagnose Barriers to
Climate Change Adaptation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no.
51 (December 21, 2010): 22031.
5 Donald Worster, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” Environmental History Review
Vol. 18 (1994): 12.
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he says, will not always yield solutions “that we can simply revive lock-stock-and-barrel
from extinction; but we can find models to study and learn from.”6
This thesis puts Worster’s ideas into practice, using the winemaking community
in La Rioja, Spain as a case study. Global climate change is not the first impending
agricultural crisis that has posed an existential threat to the vineyards of La Rioja. During
the late nineteenth century, a grapevine blight called phylloxera devastated wine regions
throughout Europe, including La Rioja. Coincidentally, phylloxera’s insidious
progression through European vineyards occurred over a timescale that is comparable to
the one that scientists suggest climate change’s effects will unfold upon. Although
phylloxera – a near-microscopic insect that subsists off the sap of grapevine roots – began
to quite literally suck the life out of vineyards in parts of France as early as the 1860s, it
spread gradually and did not reach some other wine regions such as La Rioja until nearly
1900.7 Similarly, while some wine regions are already suffering from the effects of
climate change today, others will not have to confront this challenge until decades from
now. That is, just as many nineteenth-century grape growers had decades to organize
accordingly for the arrival of phylloxera, many contemporary grape growers will have
years to plan for the climatic changes that will befall their vineyards.
Much in the same way that La Rioja was one of the last wine regions in Europe to
suffer from phylloxera infestation, the region is predicted to remain largely unaffected by

6 Ibid., 13.
7 James Simpson, Spanish Agriculture: The Long Siesta, 1765-1965 (Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 33.
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climate change for decades to come due to its comparatively cool and wet climate.8 This
means that most Riojan viticulturists will have ample time to devise climate change
adaptation strategies in the years ahead. Intriguingly, in spite of the decades that
members of the nineteenth-century Riojan winemaking community had to preemptively
adapt their viticultural practices in anticipation of phylloxera’s arrival, they still suffered
profound economic and social hardship once the vine blight did eventually appear in their
region’s vineyards. This thesis describes and evaluates the social, economic, and
legislative factors that led to this ultimately-lackluster adaptation response to phylloxera,
and it then juxtaposes this historical model to a detailed investigation of contemporary
Riojans’ adaptation efforts in the face of climate change. Based upon this comparison,
this thesis argues that, relative to their nineteenth-century viticultural predecessors,
today’s Riojan grape growers are far more likely to achieve a timely and effective
adaptation response to their respective impending agricultural crisis.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY & CHAPTER ORGANIZATION
As a sum, the chapters of this thesis present a novel example of how
Environmental History can inform the ongoing multi-disciplinary discourse regarding the
study of climate change adaptation. However, the individual chapters within this text
engage in dialogues with works by researchers from a varied range of academic fields.
This section briefly contextualizes each of this thesis’s chapters within the broader
scholarly conversations to which they respectively contribute.

8 M. C. Ramos, G. V. Jones, and J. A. Martinez-Casasnovas, “Structure and Trends in
Climate Parameters Affecting Winegrape Production in Northeast Spain,” Climate
Research 38, no. 1 (December 2008): 2.
4