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Seasonal differences in climate in the Chianti region of Tuscany and the relationship to vintage wine quality

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Abstract

Climatic factors and weather type frequencies affecting Tuscany are examined to discriminate between vintages ranked into the upper- and lower-quartile years as a consensus from six rating sources of Chianti wine during the period 1980 to 2011. These rankings represent a considerable improvement on any individual publisher ranking, displaying an overall good consensus for the best and worst vintage years. Climate variables are calculated and weather type frequencies are matched between the eight highest and the eight lowest ranked vintages in the main phenological phases of Sangiovese grapevine. Results show that higher heat units; mean, maximum and minimum temperature; and more days with temperature above 35 °C were the most important discriminators between good- and poor-quality vintages in the spring and summer growth phases, with heat units important during ripening. Precipitation influences on vintage quality are significant only during veraison where low precipitation amounts and precipitation days are important for better quality vintages. In agreement with these findings, weather type analysis shows good vintages are favoured by weather type 4 (more anticyclones over central Mediterranean Europe (CME)), giving warm dry growing season conditions. Poor vintages all relate to higher frequencies of either weather type 3, which, by producing perturbation crossing CME, favours cooler and wetter conditions, and/or weather type 7 which favours cold dry continental air masses from the east and north east over CME. This approach shows there are important weather type frequency differences between good- and poor-quality vintages. Trend analysis shows that changes in weather type frequencies are more important than any due to global warming.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Project: “Impatto dei cambiamenti climatici sulla qualità del Chianti Classico”. The authors are grateful to the Centro Funzionale della Regione Toscana (CFR) and to the Centro Interdipartimentale di Bioclimatologia of the University of Florence (CIBIC) for providing climatic data for Siena, and to the Chianti Wine Consortia for providing wine quality data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biometeorology, CNR-IBIMET, Via Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Michael James Salinger, Marina Baldi & Giovanni A. Dalu

  2. Institute of Biometeorology, CNR-IBIMET and LaMMA, Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019, Sesto Fiorentino (Fi), Italy

    Daniele Grifoni, Giorgio Bartolini & Gianni Messeri

  3. Department of Environmental Studies, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Boulevard, Ashland, OR, 97520, USA

    Greg Jones

  4. Department of Plant, Soil and Environmental Science, University of Florence, Piazzale delle Cascine 18, 50144, Firenze, Italy

    Stefano Cecchi, Anna Dalla Marta & Simone Orlandini

  5. Accademia dei Georgofili, Firenze, Italy

    Gianpiero Maracchi

Authors
  1. Michael James Salinger
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  2. Marina Baldi
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  3. Daniele Grifoni
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  4. Greg Jones
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  5. Giorgio Bartolini
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  6. Stefano Cecchi
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  7. Gianni Messeri
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  8. Anna Dalla Marta
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  9. Simone Orlandini
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  10. Giovanni A. Dalu
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  11. Gianpiero Maracchi
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Correspondence to Marina Baldi.

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Salinger, M.J., Baldi, M., Grifoni, D. et al. Seasonal differences in climate in the Chianti region of Tuscany and the relationship to vintage wine quality. Int J Biometeorol 59, 1799–1811 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-015-0988-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-015-0988-8

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