862 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
THE NAKED GRAPE: WINE AND CLIMATE CHANGE
As acclaimed wine writer Jancis Robinson said in an e-mail to her readers
recently, “The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) is truly scary. Those of us who follow wine closely
have seen the warning signs for years. Our hearts go out to all those living
in constant fear of the catastrophic effect of drought … wildfires, … on the
American west coast, in the eastern Mediterranean or in Australia.”
Surviving yet another summer of intense heat and smoke in the Okanagan
Valley and reflecting on Robinson’s words took me back to an article I
wrote years ago in 2009. I dust it off, noting that in the intervening years
matters seem to have become mostly worse, seldom better.
When I first drafted this article in 2009, countries were gathering at the
Copenhagen Climate Change Conference leading to the Copenhagen
Accord, followed several years later by the Paris Climate Accords. These
accords have not met their goals in limiting global warming. As I revise this
article, another global conference, the UN Climate Change Conference, is
set for Glasgow at the end of October 2021. Whether the nations have the
will to make the more radical changes necessary to prevent the world overheating
remains to be seen.
And now to my repurposed column, with brackets indicating my 2021
updates.
***
My attention was caught by a web article titled “Posing Naked to Save
French Wine”. While I guiltily admit to sharing the general preconception,
best put by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, that “the French never care
what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly”, I was still
intrigued. On October 3, 2009, 713 French citizens posed in the buff in a
French vineyard while idiosyncratic photographer Spencer Tunick snapped
away. Luckily for them, it was a sunny day. Tunick, an American, is well
known for his installations featuring large numbers of naked people posed
in artistic formations. These include 7,000 in sunny Barcelona, 2,754 in less
sunny Cleveland and 1,800 in downright chilly Buffalo. The biggest mass of
naked flesh was a group of 18,000 draped around the Zócalo in Mexico City.
He has turned his attention to global warming, posing 600 hardy naked
souls as a “living sculpture” on the Aletsch Glacier to draw attention to the
shrinking of the world’s glaciers. This was done in collaboration with Greenpeace.
More recently, in 2011, Tunick photographed 1,200 volunteers
around the threatened Dead Sea and on July 18, 2016, he photographed 100
nude women in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Republican National Conven-