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MENDOZA, ARGENTINA — Its bold, aromatic tones balance perfectly with its fruity highlights, rich texture, and royal hues, creating a sense that it's alive with flavor. But the chemistry that gives Malbec, Argentina's staple wine grape, its distinct characteristics is starting to be affected by climate change, along with other wine varieties across the globe.

Mendoza, a city of 110,000 and headquarters to Argentina's wine country, lures tourists from all over the world. The backdrop of its more than 1,000 vineyards is the massive eastern slope of the Andes, a view surprisingly reminiscent of Tucson. The difference, however, is Mendoza's network of aqueducts and canals that border its tiled sidewalks, ready to harvest mountain rain and snowmelt.

To a visitor strolling through Mendoza's vineyards amid rustling, ripening vines hung with clusters of maturing purple grapes, climate-driven changes aren't readily noticeable. However, the grapes' natural acidity levels are dropping, sweetness is increasing, and alcohol content is on the rise.

As a result, Juan Augustín Garay, wine specialist and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Center of Enologists says, "Argentine viticulture will suffer."

According to Garay and other wine experts, the average temperature of wine-producing regions worldwide will increase 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 50 years. Among the major impacts on wine cultivation is the change in alcohol levels.

Because of climate change in the Mendoza region and an increase in consecutive hot days, Garay says the vines are having to work much harder. In Mendoza, summer temperatures can fluctuate up to 45 degrees from day to night.

Garay says this difference favors the vine during the grape's growth as the drop in temperature lets the plant process what it has photosynthesized during the day.

In recent years, however, the thermal difference has minimized, causing the vines to continue working throughout the night. If the night stays hot, Garay says, the plant will be confused as to what to do on its downtime.

"The plant is exactly like a human. If it doesn't rest during the night in the summer, it won't go to work the next day."

As the plant works through the night, sugar content rises beyond normal levels. Once fermented, the sugar turns to alcohol. And one result is that the wine's carefully cultivated taste changes.

The problem of rising alcohol levels has even reached Arizona's wine industry.

"Global warming impacts flavor," agrees Kent Callaghan, owner of Elgin's Callaghan Vineyards, 40 miles southeast of Tucson. "The grapes are gaining sugar, but the vines have effectively shut down. They are not really photosynthesizing. You're just losing water and gaining sugar concentration; you're not getting any flavor in the wine."

People can't drink a bottle of wine without getting drunk anymore, says Callaghan. "The whole model for wine, at least civilized wine consumption, was based on drinking wine with food. So if you have a glass of 16 percent alcohol, two people really can't get through a bottle. It's not like drinking Bordeaux at 12.5 percent — it's a totally different ballgame."

In Argentina and Australia, vintners are using machines to extract alcohol from already finished wines.

But according to Ricardo Villalba, director of the Argentine Institute for Snow, Ice, and Environmental Sciences, temperature is not the only threat to wine production. Water, he says, is rapidly becoming worrisome.

"Sadly, all of Latin America is suffering a catastrophe that can't be measured, but everyone's still saying 'Oh yeah, we're fine,'" says Villalba.

Unlike Arizona, the problem isn't necessarily water scarcity. More violent storms and harder rainfall are making life less predictable for Argentine wine producers, who increasingly track these changes and try to guess what effects they will have on the characteristics of the wine.

Not all vintners see the effects of global warming. José Alberto Zuccardi, owner of the Zuccardi Family Vineyard in Mendoza, believes that climate change is a slow process that won't begin to show its effects on the grapes for many years.

But laborers at the Zuccardi Family Vineyard feel differently. Zuccardi employee Oscar Julio Poder says "there has been an increase in extreme weather events and extreme storms."

"These intense rains produce humidity that we aren't accustomed to," adds Mariano Travieso, the agronomist for the Zuccardi Family Vineyard. "And this humidity causes fungus as well as certain diseases."

Given all these factors, Travieso worries that if solutions aren't found, the quality of the wine will suffer. He shares the concern of scientists that these intense rainfalls are creating a false sense of hope that Argentina will avoid a problem that's growing around the globe: diminishing water resources.

In Mendoza, the rows of tall, slender pines that bend to form green arches to welcome visitors to the endless row of vines disguise the fact that the province is a desert, not unlike Arizona.

The difference is its intricate system of dikes, dams and canals fed by snow from the Andes. Here, much depends on water harvested from winter snowfalls. These harvests are rapidly decreasing due to the changes in annual weather patterns.

"At this point, we have enough water," says Ricardo Nordenstrom, civil engineer for Mendoza's General Department of Irrigation, pointing to a map showing the Cipoletti dike, which funnels 80 percent of its water to agriculture.

In Argentina the season is now autumn. Agriculture requires little water after the March and April harvests, and winter normally brings snow.

However, in recent years, snow has become scarcer in the region, making some nervous.

"We used to have a very strong winter and our spring and summer had an acceptable quality of heat that would favor the plant," wine specialist Garay recalls, shaking his head.

"Now we notice that our winter isn't the same as before." At the same time, he adds, summer is bringing "something we didn't have before, a lot of rain. A lot of rain."

Erratic rainfall can sometimes be a boon. In Arizona, Callaghan Vineyards' spring tasting list offered a preface to the list of 2005 and 2006 vintages attributing the deep and full flavors to the "abnormally high" rainfalls during the summer monsoon of those years.

But in both Arizona and Argentina, occasional bursts of unusually strong rain — sometimes too much rain — can't disguise the fact that overall drought is increasing.

"So we all have a large problem that there won't be enough water for irrigation or there will be too much rain and the crops will rot," says Villalba. "The people don't want to see it. They have enough problems on their minds. Let's hope that man starts to better his relationship with the environment, because we are facing an environmental disaster."