Monitoring climate related risk and opportunities for wine sector: the MED-GOLD Pilot Service

MED-GOLD is a four-year research and innovation project, whose main aim was to co-develop climate services for three staples of the Mediterranean food system, namely grapes, olives and durum wheat. This paper describes the methodology adopted for the co-development of the pilot climate service for the wine sector, focusing on the Douro Demarcated Region (DDR) in northern Portugal. 

In the first step, the MED-GOLD Champion Sogrape Vinhos identified  the key management decisions, the climatic information of interest and users’ needs for the wine sector in the DDR. From this information, the relevant bioclimatic indicators (and the key essential climate variables - ECVs) were identified and obtained. Afterwards, two compound risk indices, the Sanitary and Heat Risk indices, were also calculated as a combination of some of the aforementioned bioclimatic indicators. This methodological work was validated against the empirical climate characterization for the region of interest, of several ‘bad’ and ‘good’ years  chosen by users according to their recollections of grape and wine production outcomes, namely overall quality and yields. In addition, the overall strategy for selection of these years is presented. Then, the two components of the service based on seasonal predictions and longer-term climate projections are described. 

The final step was the development of the MED-GOLD Dashboard, an interactive tool that displays detailed historical climate data, seasonal predictions and climate projections. The dashboard is a map-based, user-focused visualization interface to aid easy access to and understanding of the data computed in an ICT platform. The dashboard was iteratively co-designed with the users to ensure their needs were met.