An overview of climate change impacts on European viticulture

By Helder Fraga, A. Malheiro, J. Moutinho-Pereira, J. Santos. 2012

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The importance of viticulture and of the winemaking socioeconomic sector in Europe is largely acknowledged. The most famous winemaking regions in Europe commonly present very specific environmental characteristics, where climate often plays a central role. Furthermore, given the strong influence of the atmospheric factors on this crop, climate change can significantly affect yield and wine quality under future conditions. Trends recorded in the recent past on many viticultural regions in Europe hint at an already pronounced increase in the growing-season mean temperatures. Furthermore, climate-change projections give evidence for significant changes in both the growing-season temperatures and precipitations in the next decades. Although grapevines have several survival strategies, the mounting evidence for significant climate change in the upcoming decades urges adaptation and mitigation measures to be taken by the whole winemaking sector. Short-term adaptation measures can be considered as a first protection strategy and should be focused at specific threats, mostly changes in crop-management practices (e.g., irrigation, sunscreens for leaf protection). At long term, however, a wide range of adaptation measures should be considered (e.g., varietal and land allocation changes). An overview of the current scientific knowledge, mostly concerning the European viticulture, the potential climate change impacts, and feasible adaptation measures is provided herein.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d9c1ef9e61255219f24b6b03536a878d7e7e43fa

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Citations in the corpus

• What do we know about grapevine bunch compactness? A state‐of‐the‐art review (2018, background): “Climate change is expected to have important impacts on worldwide viticulture, and viticulturists will face new challenges derived from the joint effect of higher temperature, water stress, CO2 and solar radiation (Fraga et al. 2013, Hannah et al. 2013).”
• Variability of water use efficiency in grapevines (2014, background): “Europe presents the largest vineyard area in the world (around 38%), mostly located in Mediterranean areas (Fraga et al., 2013; Mullins et al., 1992).”
• An Update on the Impact of Climate Change in Viticulture and Potential Adaptations (2019, unknown): “The output of grape production in terms of yield and quality can be optimized through the choice of plant material, such as variety [2,3], clone [4,5], and rootstock [6], and through the choice of viticultural techniques, such training system [7], and vineyard floor management [8] (see also [1]).”