“My father once told me that if a winemaker could make one great vintage in his lifetime, he could die a happy man,” says Jean-René Matignon, of Château Pichon-Longueville. The technical director of one of Bordeaux’s most prestigious wine producers began making wine in 1985 and was fortunate enough to have his first great vintage as soon as 1988. “After that superb year, I said to myself, ‘Well, I could tell my father I had made my one great vintage.’”

As it turned out, that was just the beginning. The company had an even better vintage in 1989, and a great one in 1990, 1995 and 1996. In fact, after almost 25 years at Pichon, Matignon has enjoyed 10 top-quality vintages. “This is something my father would never have dreamed of.”

Matignon’s experience isn’t unique. Winemakers from Rioja to the Rhine and Orvieto to Oregon have been enjoying unparalleled quality and consistency. Global warming, it seems, has been a boon, delivering ideal conditions in many of the world’s established winemaking regions.

However, more and more research suggests it may change for the worse, and at a conference in Barcelona this year, viticulturalists and climate scientists warned that if temperatures continued to increase at the current rate, the wine industry would change beyond recognition.

“As temperatures rise in the hottest wine-producing areas,” says Richard Smart, one of the world’s pre-eminent independent viticulturalists, “it will no longer be possible to grow wine varieties there successfully.” The prognosis isn’t much better in cooler and moderately warm regions either. Although producers won’t have to stop making wine, says Smart, they will have to make significant changes. Champagne will be a thing of the past, as will Bordeaux, Burgundy, Chianti, Rioja and just about any other European wine you can think of. “All of the regional styles will change,” says Smart. For those in Europe that have built up reputations based around regional styles of wine over decades, sometimes centuries, it could be disastrous.

But while there is a growing body of scientific research to support Smart’s predictions, many winemakers are refusing to accept them, believing the claims are exaggerated, that the science on which projections are based fails to comprehend the complexities of viticulture and also underestimates their ability to adapt to changing weather patterns.

It was the Ancient Greeks who first introduced viniculture to Italy, France and Spain, in around 750 BC, but it took generations of winemakers to establish today’s well-known regional styles. The key to producing the best wine, they found, lay in identifying which varieties performed best in their particular environment.

Despite the range of climates in which grapes can thrive, each variety also requires particular conditions to achieve optimum ripeness, and it’s this principle that has contributed to the development of Europe’s distinctive regional wine styles. After centuries of experimentation, winemakers found that cabernet sauvignon was best suited to the Bordeaux region, for example, and chardonnay to Burgundy.