A few months ago, I was at a farmers market when I saw one of the first butternut squashes of the season on a local grower’s table. Cool, I thought, butternut squash season is here. I love those oddly shaped little guys. Butternut squash makes a great risotto (as Cookingchat and Good Wine Under $20 announced recently), and it also serves as the basis for a classic bistro pasta dish, butternut squash-filled ravioli with fried sage leaves.

Excited by the possibilities, I picked one up, brought it home, and placed it on the kitchen table like a trophy. It was ready. Except for one little problem…I had forgotten how much work it was to remove the usable interior of the butternut squash from the thick, unyielding exterior. That sucker is hard to cut, and the irregularity of the shape doesn’t help either. After looking at it a moment, I decided that I didn’t have the time or energy – I forget which – to use it that night, so I left it where it was. Which is where it stayed. For days…then weeks…then months. Unused. Neglected. Until one day, I had to face up to the fact that it was gone, and was forced to throw it away. A sad reminder of my own indifference to the poor dude’s ticking biological clock.

What’s all this got to do with anything? Well, it’s all a very long way of pointing out that we all have something or other in our lives that we really should be doing something about before it becomes an unfixable problem, yet never somehow get around to before it’s too late, like my ex-friend the squash. But while the small things we neglect tend to come and go without too much of an impact, there are big problems that we all are at least a little complicit in, problems that we avoid thinking too much about because a) our part of the problem is a very, very small one and b) we alone could never solve it. Yet our avoidance, when adjoined to the avoidance of every other person in our community or our country, simply propels that problem a little further down the road – a little closer to the point of no return. What kind of problem, you ask? Well, how about a crazy little thing called global warming?

Okay, most (all?) of us can  acknowledge that global warming is a massive problem that needs fixing soon. But what is this discussion doing on a food and wine blog? The answer is, it has everything to do with what you eat and where it comes from. And if you care at all about the origin of what comes across your plate every day, that’s a big issue. I’ve been thinking about this for a little while, but the close look at the effects of global warming on the state’s wine economy that came out recently in the Los Angeles Times has me thinking about it much more often. It really is required reading if you live in California and you care about its wine.

I’m not going to spend much time talking about how global warming will affect the type, quality, and quantity of produce that we see here in southern California or anywhere else, because I don’t know enough about the geographic boundaries of what is grown where here. Suffice it to say that we’ll feel the difference in climate when we head to the farmers market each week. But I do know enough about California wine regions to recognize that many of them are in real danger of being transformed completely by a significant change in temperature – either into a place that will be forced to grow an entirely different style of wine than those currently in practice, or a place that simply cannot sustain wine-producing grapes.  And it’s some of California’s most cherished wines – its earthy, subtle Pinot Noir, its complex and rich (and unoaked, when you can find it!) Chardonnay – that are facing a real crisis, conceivably as soon as this decade. Folks, there’s no other way to put it: the biological clocks on dozens, if not hundreds, of vineyards are ticking. And a hundred tons of grapes won’t fit in our garbage cans.

Over the next few days, I want to take a look at some of the wine-growing regions in immediate danger from global warming. I want to talk about what makes cool-climate wines stand apart in this state. I want to taste an example of a cool-climate California wine to see if I can pick out what makes these wines different from their warm-weather brethren, and I want to see what other information is out there about the affect of global warming on wine. So if you’re not into the whole global warming thing, check back in on Friday for a new restaurant review. Otherwise, let’s everyone look into their cellar or on their kitchen counter, and think about whether or not what you have there would even exist if the world was 10 degrees hotter.