Viticulture and climate: from global to local

Aims: This review aims to (1) present the multiple interests of studying and depicting and climate spatial variability for vitivinicultural terroirs study; (2) explain the factors that affect climate spatial variability according to the spatial scale considered and (3) provide guidelines for climate zoning considering challenges linked to each methodology considered.

Methods and Results: Scientific contributions of the 12 Terroir Conferences proceedings since 1996 have been reviewed together with Vitis-Vea, Oeno One, ASEV, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and Wiley Online Library data bases with various keywords combination of “Climate”, “Spatial analysis”, “Wine”, “Viticulture”, “Area”, “Scale”, “Terroir” and “Zoning”, including English, Italian and Spanish languages. This literature review led to the classification of climate spatial analysis related studies according to the spatial extent, scale, source of data, spatialization method and indices used to depict the spatial structure of climate. To illustrate the scale issue for climate spatial analysis of wine growing terroirs, a comparison of spatial structure of climate depicted by either large scale data (Worldclim v2.0and CRU4.2TS), point data (weather stations) and spatial interpolation of local weather stations was performed in Bordeaux (2001-2005 period) wine region. It shows the limitations of coarse resolution (macroclimate scale) data to depict mesoscale data.

Conclusions: 

The climate spatial variability of wine producing regions have been widely documented, yet not exhaustively. However, climate indices and period are not standardized which makes it difficult to compare the climate of terroirs based on the existing literature. Analysing spatial structure might lead to different conclusions according to the source of the data, and thus special care should be provided to the methods, scale and uncertainties associated to spatial data.

Significance and Impact of the Study: This study provides in a nutshell an overview of climate analysis for terroir studies that could be useful for students, winegrowers and researchers interested in climate spatial analysis.