Diurnal Temperature Variation throughout Long Growing Seasons Preserve Acidity

Описание: Karen MacNeil (author of The Wine Bible) speaks about the role of Diurnal Temperature Variation in wine grape cultivation as being a major contributor to the complexity of wines whose fruit ripens slowly over longer numbers of days due to the cool evenings that its terroir affords. More than just the longer total growing season, it is the number of evenings rest that the vines have which gives them the strength to express themselves. She notes that it is the cool evenings which contribute to the preservation of acidity, while the warm days bring about the raw flavonoids and brix. Karen says that "Acidity allows a wine to have its' 'frame' or structure" so that it can feel precise on the palate. In contrast to cool evenings, she explains that "If you just had warm days and warm nights, you could ripen so quickly that the growing season would be truncated. In such a case, making a complex wine becomes close to impossible. Complexity, or a greatly developed nuance, requires an incrementally slow march to ripeness. You can end up anywhere, but the longer that it takes to get there, the better. Long growing seasons, especially growing seasons with huge luminosity, as opposed to heat per se, make fantastic wines. This can only be possible with cold nights."

Ms. MacNeil delivered this presentation to a technical tasting seminar in the Castilla De La Mancha Roadshow 2012 in San Francisco. Her argument pointed to the specific advantages that Castilla La Mancha enjoys over the other growing regions in Spain, lending credibility to forecasts that this region will emerge from its long held traditions of being not so well known in the rest of the world. Parenthetically, this concept also applies to under-appreciated or less-recognized terroirs throughout the world which will become more significant in their own times as regions shift under the long term effects of climate change.