The drought in California has a potential upside – less water means more flavorful wine, says public radio KPCC in Pasadena. A winemaker in Napa, Stephanie Honig, says this could be a banner year for California wine. Grapevines are under stress from lack of water and the “berries are going to have good quality,” Honig tells KPCC. A spokesman for the California Association of Wine Grape Growers, added, “The berries have been smaller, but the flavors – the intensity of the sugars – have been greater because of the drought.” Vineyards are expected to produce about 4 million tons of grapes, about the same size as the 2014 harvest, because irrigation water is available although at diminished volumes.
In other drought coverage, ProPublica uses the third installment of its series, “Killing the Colorado,” to look at water law in the West, which often is condensed to “first-come, first-served” and “use it or lose it.” Landowners are compelled to take their full allocation of water, even if some of it will be wasted, rather than expose themselves to curtailments in the future. On top of that, in the 1922 compact that divided access to the water among seven states, “more water was divvied up on paper than would actually run through the river.” Today, there are allocations for 16.5 million acre-feet of water annually but the average flow is 12.4 million acre-feet. Says ProPublica, “Officials in the seven states have never renegotiated the original river compact or fundamentally changed the foundations of water law that lead to overuse. The result is a set of codified principles designed for a different era and divorced from today’s environmental realities.”