Winemakers in China are turning to tech solutions to save their grapes from climate change. Will AI modeling and genetic modification keep the casks full?
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00:00Purple grapes ripen on the vine, not in Bordeaux, Tuscany, or Napa, but in the northwest of China.
00:08This vineyard in Ningxia is at the heart of China's wine industry and efforts to protect it from a changing climate.
00:16This part of China is bitterly cold in winter, forcing growers to bury their vines to keep them safe.
00:23But winters are warming, leading farmers to question whether the grape varieties they use will hold up in the coming decades,
00:30as rising temperatures bring a different set of problems.
00:34For the head of this experimental farm, genetics could hold the key.
00:54The research backing up this crossbreeding program takes place in far-off Beijing,
00:59where labs use AI to speed up the process of evaluating up to 20,000 new genotypes per year.
01:06The lab does mathematical modeling, too, to predict where in China we'll see the best-growing conditions on a hotter planet.
01:24in the context of climate change.
01:27So what will happen in the next 10 years, 30 years, or 50 years, or 100 years?
01:34So to do that, we have to use a coupling of prediction of climate with different scenarios,
01:42and also with mathematical modeling work to see what will be the performance of the wine.
01:50Chinese winemakers are betting that a changing global climate will mean consumer attitudes
01:55favoring pure varieties will have to shift in favor of hybrids like these.
02:01Above all else, though, they hope to create wines with a distinctive Chinese flavor.
02:06Growers from other parts of China are already coming to appreciate these wines.
02:212023 saw global wine production drop 10 percent, largely due to severe weather conditions.
02:27Chinese producers want to stay a step ahead of droughts and other events to keep their vintages flowing.
02:34Leon Lien, John Ventriest, and Jonathan Kaplan for Taiwan Plus.