Paper short abstract:

In the Catalan High Pyrenees, global climate becomes legible through policies promoting upland viticulture. Marketing of local heritage resort to global climate to justify the return to wine-making in the region. Climate change and tradition mix together in the making of heritage wine.

Paper long abstract:

In the Catalan High Pyrenees, experimentation with new forms of patrimonialization are taking place. By the end of the 20th century, the idea of Pyrenean rural people's 'traditional' customs fed the urbanites' taste for 'heritage", as in the mystified and idyllic epiphenomenon of the authentic life they sought. In this paper, I will describe the shifts happening in the southernmost district of the Catalan High Pyrenees, the Pallars Jussà. Wine is becoming increasingly important for the regional economy. Though vineyards disappeared at the hand of the Phylloxera parasite more than one hundred years ago, they were subsequently reintroduced over the last decades as a means to a profitable heritage product. Now we are seeing a new phase in which geological quality and weather features are being deployed in the discourse surrounding their cultivation. Under the banner of climate change, wine production frontier is being pushed above sea level. While heritage labels provide farmers with certification of 'terroir' under the scrutiny of the EU, science of global climate places terroir within a hierarchy of favourable geographies and temporality linked to the prospective conservation of wine-making itself. Promotion of upland wine-making by district state officials turns global climate concerns into the local ecosystem's heritage forte, offering geology courses and experimental cellar techniques to the farmers as a way to define their identity in the face of future challenges around environmental degradation. In Pallars Jussà, global climatic statements convey the means for the re-establishment of the "authentic" traditional rural past.