Adaptation of grapevines to climate change
Climate change is causing important changes in winemaking practices at management due to increased temperatures and reduced rainfall.
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are leading to climate change, which will pose new challenges for winegrowers. Indeed, the expected changes in growing conditions will have a negative impact on the development of the most cultivated vine varieties, on their phenolic composition and, ultimately written request, on wine quality. Consequently, maintaining production and quality under future climatic conditions is a challenge for academic community and the wine industry. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) forecasts an increase in atmosphericCO2 concentration (700 ppm) and an increase in temperature (4°C) by 2100 due to the greenhouse effect, together with a reduction in the availability of water. These changes produce, in plant species adapted to the environmental conditions, a higher incidence of stress, endangering the sustainability of the production of some of them in their traditional growing areas. In the Mediterranean area , the lack of adaptation to the most common conditions or stresses (high temperature, drought and salinity) limits the productivity of many species, including grapevines. For this reason, vine variety improvement programs must obtain plant material adapted to the new environmental scenario.
Viticulture is of great importance in Spain, both in terms of the surface area it occupies and its socioeconomic relevance, and is distributed among the different designations of origin, including those of Navarra and La Rioja. Currently, in Spain and in other European countries with ancient viticulture, there is a growing interest in rescuing forgotten minority cultivars. issue In this sense, recent work carried out at the Estación de Viticultura y Enología de Navarra (EVENA) has made it possible to recover a large number of old vine varieties cultivated both in Navarra and in other areas of the Ebro Valley. The oenological potential of some of them is known and everything indicates that they have an important commercial projection. Therefore, the study of these old varieties and their potential to adapt to stresses accentuated by climate change is not only economically but also ecologically beneficial, contributing greatly to the development of sustainable agriculture.
In this context, the group of research of Plant Stress Physiology at BIOMA has been working for about 20 years on the response and adaptation of crops, including grapevine, to different climate change scenarios. For this purpose, it has specific facilities for this subject of programs of study such as growth chambers, chamber greenhouses (GCG), and thermal gradient greenhouses (TGG).
In some cases, such as the TGG, these are unique facilities in Spain that allow studying the effect of the aforementioned climate change factors (CO2 and temperature) separately or in combination. The general goal of project is to study the adaptive capacity of several ancient grapevine varieties recovered in Navarra to different environmental factors associated with climate change. The study analyzes the growth, production, plant physiology and quality of the grapes, as well as their potential for quality winemaking.
