The challenging issue of climate change for sustainable grape and wine production

Nathalie Ollat,Jean-Marc Touzard,Iñaki Garcia de Cortazar-Atauri,Cornelis Van Leeuwen

doi:10.20870/oeno-one.2017.51.2.1872

Abstract

Grape production, wine quality, climatic conditions and geographical origins are closely related, making ongoing climate change a quite challenging issue for this economic sector. How will climatic conditions be affected locally ? How will local climate interact with topography, resulting in high climatic variability at vineyard scale ? How will vine performance, berry composition and wine quality be modified ? And what can be done to adapt vine growing and wine making practices to these new conditions ? These are the key questions the wine industry has to address in the following decades. In this context, it is obvious that this issue will require the development of close collaboration between actors, including producers and wine makers, extension services, marketing, policy makers and scientists. For the scientific community, addressing the climate change issue requires multidisciplinary studies and new scientific approaches.

Highlights

Since 2012, the LACCAVE project, developed in France to study the long term impacts and define adaptation strategies for viticulture and oenology, was based on this vision
Interactions with high CO2 have to be taken into account and impacts of future climatic conditions may be larger than might be predicted from experiments examining factors one by one (Edwards et al, 2017)
Especially aroma compounds, is a real matter of concern. These molecules contribute to the typical identity of wines and are highly variable according to climatic conditions and growing practices (Pons et al, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

Since 2012, the LACCAVE project, developed in France to study the long term impacts and define adaptation strategies for viticulture and oenology, was based on this vision. General trends of already observed and expected climate change and their impacts on grape growing show that the planet has is warmer than at any time in our recorded past and extremes in temperature and precipitation have increased (Jones, 2017, in this issue). Climatic modelling at the appropriate scale is crucial to simulate future conditions (Quenol et al 2017). High resolution atmospheric modelling provides useful information to understand climate variability at high spatial and temporal scale and to allow better decisionmaking for adaptation at the terroir level (Sturman et al, 2017).

Results

Conclusion