🌿 Climate and wine

A vineyard’s climate is the typical weather of the place: how much warmth, rain, sun and wind it has through the year. Climate is one of the most important factors affecting wine. It is part of terroir, meaning all the conditions of the place where grapes grow.

Climates differ. A cool one gives light wines with high acidity and modest strength. A warm one gives ripe, sweet berries and stronger wines. There is also continental climate with hot summers and cold winters, Mediterranean with mild winters and dry summers, and maritime with mild, damp weather. A microclimate is a special set of conditions on a single plot, for example on a slope by a river.

Warmth is measured with the Winkler index, a sum of temperatures over the growing season. It is used to divide areas into cooler and warmer ones. The vine grows well in the “wine belt”, the bands between roughly 30 and 50 degrees of latitude in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Weather decides the vintage: in different years wine from one plot turns out differently. Frost, hail and drought are dangers. Climate change is pushing growers to change varieties and areas. Alcohol is for adults.