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Saturday Feb 3, 2007 was National Arbor Day.

In order to spread the word about the global warming crisis, I set up a vendor booth along with about twenty five other vendors showing their wine industry wares at the North Carolina Winegrowers Association annual meeting.  For my booth, I created three talking point posters.
One large three panel poster was the centerpiece with twenty slides from the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” titled “The Climate Project”. I set up a flat panel monitor with AIT slide show on automatic. On the second poster board, in order to draw people, were beautiful photographs of our vineyard in each season: spring, summer, fall and winter. As people walked by, I could see the quizzical look on their face. I told them I was not selling anything but asked, “Did they know today was National Arbor Day?” I had them come closer to look at the third poster with the hardiness zone map changes I downloaded from www.arborday.com that shows the U.S. hardiness zone changes from 1990 to 2006. Also on this poster I showed a classic viticulturist zone map of grape varietals by zone broken down by growing degree days which is the heat summation of the growing season. I showed our vineyard’s 2006 GGD and how we are on the verge of heating up too much. I then said, “If we continue to increase heat summation the next 16 years in the same fashion that we have the last 16 years, the Yadkin Valley will no longer be a viable wine region.”
The reactions varied.  There were winegrowers at higher elevations that were not worried. However, after I moved to the second poster on which I used 25 slides from the AIT slide show, I segued into the other problems with global warming – more vineyard damage from stronger hurricanes, tornados, soil moisture decline and increased pressure of infectious diseases from insect vectors not dying out because of less frost days. Dr. Turner Sutton, a pierces disease researcher at NCSU was very interested. He pressed me to tell him what we could do about it.
On the back of a third poster, I dramatically turned it over and said we had to turn over a new leaf. It contained a NC Green Power application and information from NCSU “Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency”. I explained that my goal is to make the Yadkin Valley AVA the first carbon-neutral wine region in the world. I said, “What a marketing plan, eh?” As the day went on, two other professors, Dr. Grant Holder and Dr. Lucian Georgescu said they would help write a grant requesting funds for Yadkin Valley wineries to achieve this goal.   
One reporter, Rebel Goode, the editor of “One the Vine” at yadkinvalley.com, talked to me at length and wants to do a story for the next issue. I think I was well received. I have a lot of follow-up work!