Climate and terroir of New Zealand wine regions: a GIS perspective

Climate and 'terroir' are the two major commonly used set of factors when describing a wine region apart from those relating to 'Cultiva' or variety. The latter is given the utmost consideration during site selection and once the vines are planted and established 'climate and terroir' become the deterministic factors of grape crop and the consequent wine production annually. In this context, the paper looks at developing a GIS of thematic digital maps along with grape crop/ wine production / wine quality data to analysing the year-to-year variability by looking at the spatial patterns and correlations between dependent and independent factors, using geospatial tools at different scales, such as New Zealand wine regions and within a vineyard