(Slate) - If plants had a climate change ambassador akin to the animal kingdom’s polar bear, it would probably be pinot noir. If the withholding, thin-skinned, and heat-averse wine grape were your girlfriend, your friends would call her high-maintenance.

Even subtle shifts in climate affect pinot noir. Oenophiles worship its “transparency”: the unfiltered expression of both terroir and vintage—where it was grown and what conditions it faced while doing it. Pinot noir likes to live on the edge, producing its most elegant expression when planted in warmer pockets of cooler places. As frost-tolerant as many whites, it has the narrowest agreeable temperature range of the top 15 most planted varietals.

Think of it as the Goldilocks of grapes, producing flabby and boring wine if it’s too hot, flat-out refusing to ripen if it’s too cold, but creating magic in a glass when conditions are just right.

But unfortunately, those “just right” conditions are becoming less predictable in pinot noir’s typical stomping grounds in the United States: drought-stricken California and even farther north, in heat-buffeted Oregon. Both states saw the earliest wine grape harvests on record this fall, with many vineyards hauling in their last bin of grapes before the first bunch would have been cut in what used to be called an average year. In both states, 2014 will go down as the warmest vintage on record, beating out 2013, the next warmest.

“Is there a change? Duh,” says Chehalem founder Harry Peterson Nedry, who began making wine in Oregon in 1980 and who has been a sounding the climate change alarm for more than 15 years now. “We’re getting warmer and warmer.”

For grape farmers farther north, the prospect of a few extra degrees can sound more like a snuggly blanket and less like an existential threat. In Washington state, New York’s Finger Lakes, and British Columbia, the warming effects of climate change are improving the size and quality of pinot noir planted on the chilly outreaches of the grape’s range.

“The Puget Sound right now is where the Willamette Valley used to be in the ’70s,” says Greg Jones, a wine climate change expert and director of business, communication, and the environment at Southern Oregon University. In those early days of modern Oregon viticulture, it was tough to get one or two of 10 vintages to ripen, he said. “Now we’re ripening eight to nine good vintages out of 10.”

Planting vineyards in Washington and Canada offers its own challenges, including shorter growing seasons (though more hours of daylight). There is increased risk of both frost and storms from the Gulf of Alaska that can sweep through at just the wrong times.

But as rising prices per acre in Oregon will attest, the land rush there is definitely on, with winemakers and speculators from California, France, Las Vegas, and beyond recently snapping up parcels. Vineyard real estate is still not near the $300,000-plus per acre that Napa commands, but recent sales have pushed toward $60,000 per planted acre.

“Pinot noir is always looking for the warm sites in the cool areas, and some of us are having to migrate to achieve that as time goes on,” says British Columbia winemaker Grant Stanley, who moved to the Okanagan Valley in 2003, after 15 years of making wine in New Zealand and Oregon. If pinot noir could fly, it might choose to follow the path Stanley took. Winemakers, he said, “were being fried out of California, and now they are in Oregon and Washington.”

He embraces the polar bear metaphor. “We might be the last iceberg,” he says, gesturing at 50th Parallel Estate, a $25 million winery still under construction at the same latitude as the pinot noir mothership: Burgundy, France. Shiny mica flakes in the soil glint extra sunlight onto vines precision-planted to maximize sun bouncing off neighboring Okanagan Lake, a glacier-gouge so deep in places you could sink a 70-story building into it and not see the cellphone antennae on top.