Andrew Wood, a DPhil student in the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology and first author of the study, said: ‘Weather drives wine quality and wine taste.
Andrew Wood, a DPhil student in the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology and first author of the study, said: ‘Weather drives wine quality and wine taste. We found evidence that temperature and precipitation effects occur throughout the year—from bud break, while the grapes are growing and maturing, during harvesting, and even overwinter when the plant is dormant.’
The same vineyard can produce different vintage qualities in different years, despite those wines coming from grapes grown on the same vines, on the same land, and being produced by the same methods. How yearly fluctuations in weather influences wine quality has been a long-standing question. A newer, related, question is how climate change might impact wine quality. Weather and climate—the latter describing the weather over a long period of time—are expected to impact crops, but the link between climate change and agricultural produce quality has not been widely explored.
To investigate how weather and climate impact wine quality, the researchers paired high-resolution climate data with annual wine critic scores from the Bordeaux wine region in southwest France from 1950 to 2020. They analysed wine quality both at the regional scale (i.e., how did Bordeaux wine quality in general vary from year to year?) and on a more local scale, focusing on yearly variation in wine quality for individual “appellations d’origine contrôlée” (AOCs) within Bordeaux—specific geographical regions with defined methods of grape cultivation and wine production. Then, they used models to test whether wine quality was impacted by weather factors such as season length and ranges and shifts in temperature and precipitation.
Read more at: University of Oxford
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