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You may have drunk wines from California’s Napa Valley – it’s home to some of the New World’s finest.

Annie Favia has been working in Napa’s wine industry for more than ten years and says the changes in the climate are there to see. ‘I can’t say specifically that it is climate change, but it is definitely getting warmer,’ she says. ‘You get these heat spikes when you get scorching temperatures and they can last for up to a week at a time. The hot weather burns the fruit. The sugar level in the grape goes up before the fruit is ready and the result is you get higher and higher levels of alcohol.’

Annie and her husband Andy Erickson are small-scale producers, making up to 800 cases a year for the high end of the wine market: a bottle of Favia sells for between US $50 and US $500. Annie has tried to protect the grapes from the scorching temperatures, installing micro-sprinklers that spray a fine mist and keep the temperatures down. ‘We are using irrigation a lot more,’ she says. ‘So far it hasn’t been a problem for us, but there are a couple of regions in Napa that are water-deficient.’

More than 80 per cent of agriculture in California depends on irrigation, mainly fed by snow melt in the mountains. But snowfall is predicted to decline by anything from 30 to 90 per cent by the end of the century, leaving growers at the mercy of unreliable rain. ‘We are way out of control,’ says Annie. ‘We are changing things and we do not know what is going to happen. That is pretty scary.’