Climate change may help NZ's wine industry

While New Zealand's pillar dairy industry has been warned to adapt to more frequent droughts, the country's wine industry is likely to benefit from increasingly dryer and warmer summers as a result of climate change, a university weather expert said Tuesday. 

The production of wine grapes benefited from relatively constant warm and sunny conditions over the summer, which helped the grapes mature and develop the unique flavors of different varieties, University of Canterbury meteorologist professor Andy Sturman said.

"The impact of changing weather patterns is likely to vary across the country, because of the effect of New Zealand's complex and mountainous terrain. So some parts of the country may experience rather different temperature and rainfall trends than others," he said in a statement.

"It appears that the belt of anticyclones (high pressure systems) that circles the southern hemisphere has drifted southward. This shift in climate zones is not likely to continue indefinitely so will probably stabilize after a while and New Zealand may settle into a new weather regime."

Sturman is heading an international research project into climate and vineyards, which is expected to result in an increase of up to 10 percent in income for the New Zealand wine industry.

The two-year project is using cutting-edge high-resolution computer systems to investigate localized vineyard weather.

The data for the past few decades suggested that the typical variability in New Zealand's weather from year to year would continue, but the overall trend was for more dry and warm summers resulting from an increase in occurrence of anticyclones over the New Zealand region.

The last southern summer saw government officially declare all of the North Island and parts of the South Island to be in drought, but the New Zealand Winegrowers industry group said last month it had been perfect for growing and ripening grapes.

New Zealand Winegrowers chief executive officer Philip Gregan said the indications were that the vintage 2013 would be "one to remember."

New Zealand's wine exports earned about 1.2 billion NZ dollars (1.02 billion U.S. dollars) last year.

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