Soil Temperature and Climate Change: Implications for Mediterranean Vineyards 

In the next years the territorial environmental certification could become realistic if the following conditions will be fully satisfied:
– the enhancement of the environmental awareness among the industries, the public administration, the authorization bodies, the living people of that territory as well as the tourists and visitors.

Chile is considered vulnerable to climate change; and these phenomena affect several mechanisms in the grape physiology and quality. The global temperature increase affects sugar contents, organic acids, and phenolic compounds in grapes, producing an imbalance maturity. In this sense, an alternative to reduce the impact is to perform pruning after vine budburst, known as “Late Pruning” (LP).

The characterization of the plant is the obliged pathway between the environment and the product. The responses of the plant amplify or reduce the variations of the environment, while determining directly the type and the quality of the products. These results are inscribed inside the Viticultural Terroir Unit (VTU). VTU is the complex interaction between the Basic Terroir Unit or BTU (interaction mesoclimate x soil/subsoil), the genotype (variety x rootstock), the management system, the oenological technologies. Thus, at the most complex level, a global biological triptych is found again : environment (source) x plant (structure) = produced and exchanged substances.

Field irrigation experiments were performed on young « Nonpareil » almond trees, mature « Bartlett » pear trees and mature « Pinot Noir » grapevines, to determine the relation of a number of alternative measures of plant water status (predawn and midday stem and leaf water potential), to a number of indices of plant physiological activity (leaf conductance, vegetative growth and fruit growth and composition).

Context and purpose of the study. Climate change is affecting wine production and induces a large variability in wine composition between vintages.