(Huffingtonpost) - What we know for sure is that the wine we'll drink in 2050 won't be the same as what we drink today.

Global warming has its markers, such as melting ice caps and rising sea levels. Its impact on the world's vineyards is another, lesser known issue. And so it's fitting that the COP21 conference on climate change is currently being held in Paris, and that Tuesday’s topic of discussion was agriculture.

"The vine is indeed a perennial plant that allows scientists to make comparisons from one year to another," says Herve Quenol, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and a scientist with the International Organization of Vine and Wine. "Also, this plant has well-defined stages of growth that are directly related to temperature, whether it's budding, flowering, the formation of clusters or, of course, the harvest. The consequences on these stages have been widely visible for several years."

Quenol is one of two scientists that HuffPost France spoke to in an attempt to disentangle fact from fiction regarding the effects of climate change on the vine. The other was Jean-Marc Touzard, research director at INRA, Europe's top agricultural research institute, and co-founder of the Laccave project, a long-term research project looking at how vineyards can adapt to global warming. The Laccave project’s findings will be presented in the spring of 2016. In the meantime, here are some answers.

"In reality, the entire production chain has been affected" - Herve Quenol

The 196 participants at the COP21 summit are trying to agree on provisions to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Such a limit would be ideal for winemakers. "With such a contained increase, northern vineyards will get the best quality production, even if those further south will encounter some difficulties," Quenol says.

"Our studies show that below this threshold, we have solutions that already exist in most French vineyards, and the consequences can be mitigated," Touzard confirms. He says that in some soils, internal variability in exposure to the sun or microclimates can create temperature differences of between 1 to 2 degrees. "As long as the temperature variability caused by climate change is not greater than this internal variability, vineyards will be able to adapt," he concludes.

The concerns over vineyards arose in 2013 when an American climatologist published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal, predicting the death of the French vineyard. Bordeaux wines could disappear under the effect of rising temperatures, he wrote.

But the study was "hasty," Quenol says. "According to this model, there should be no pinot noir in Burgundy by now. But we're still bottling very good ones," the specialist says with a smile.

He conceded that in the future, the world map of wine will look different than it does today. "For example, we're already planting in new areas of northern Europe," Quenol says.

Scientists can easily measure increases in wine alcohol content over the past several decades. "We've seen a much more rapid acceleration over the past 50 years than in the previous 30,” Quenol says. The increase is particularly noticeable in the Mediterranean, where it is not uncommon to see wine with close to 15 percent alcohol.