The temperature was nearing 40C this morning in central Manchuela - as it has every day for the past month. Not a cloud. Saharan weather in the forlorn southwestern corner of Europe. Yet it was obvious we weren't in the Sahara - the landscape was covered with large, lushly green patches. It was the grapevines, of course - the only thing one can grow under these conditions, with average yearly rainfall around 12 inches only.
The vines have been enriched this year by a cool, wet but already distant spring: held by wires (otherwise they'll grow sideways on the ground), the syrah sarments reached well over seven feet high; lower, each bobal bush vine formed a small, independent but no less lush tropical forest. The fields looked gorgeous.
Castile-La Mancha's huge expanse of vineyards (600,000 hectares - the world's largest vineyard surface in a single region) is what keeps the southern half of Spain from becoming a clone of the nearby Sahara - a very real danger with climate change upon us. Yet, I thought, with grape prices dropping to under 0.15 a kilo, the (aging) population of growers has almost no financial incentive left to keep the vineyards alive. I can envisage the wholesale scrapping of vines - and a looming ecological disaster.
The vines have been enriched this year by a cool, wet but already distant spring: held by wires (otherwise they'll grow sideways on the ground), the syrah sarments reached well over seven feet high; lower, each bobal bush vine formed a small, independent but no less lush tropical forest. The fields looked gorgeous.
Castile-La Mancha's huge expanse of vineyards (600,000 hectares - the world's largest vineyard surface in a single region) is what keeps the southern half of Spain from becoming a clone of the nearby Sahara - a very real danger with climate change upon us. Yet, I thought, with grape prices dropping to under 0.15 a kilo, the (aging) population of growers has almost no financial incentive left to keep the vineyards alive. I can envisage the wholesale scrapping of vines - and a looming ecological disaster.