Climate Signals in Wine Quality Time-Series of North-East Hungary

Today’s viticulture regions for quality wine production are located in relatively narrow geographical and therefore climatic niches that put them at greater risk from climate change than other more broad acre crops. Our target area, the Mátra Region is close to the edge of optimal wine production concerning its climate conditions. Fifty year (1961-2010) wine and quality (natural sugar content, in weight % of must) data are analysed and compared to parallel climate variables. Two sets of station-based monthly temperature, sunshine duration and precipitation data, taken from neighbouring stations, Eger-Kőlyuktető (1961-2010) and Kompolt (1976-2006) are used altogether in 132 combinations. In addition, daily grid-point data provided by the CarpatClim Project are used (www.carpatclim-eu.org/pages/home). By now it is clear that (1) wine quality, is in significant negative correlation with the annual precipitation and in positive correlation with temperature and sunshine duration. (2) Applying a wide combination of monthly data we obtain even stronger correlations (higher significance according to t-tests) even from the station-based data, but it is difficult to select and optimum model from the many proper combinations just slightly differing in performance over the test sample. (3) The interpolated areal averages of the grid-point data promise good results, but their statistical analysis by using 5-day averages is just in its initial phase. It is clearly seen that June 5-day temperature means strongly influence the sugar content in the Mátra-region of NE Hungary.