What is made here
Wine colours
Colours the rules allow. Pick a colour to filter the rules and grapes below.
Where it is
Мелник in Bulgaria
- Latitude
- 41.3°–41.6° N
- Vineyard altitude
- 73 m to 447 m
- Production zone
- 64,664 ha
Lies within
Долината на Струма
Worked out from the boundaries (smallest container first). They follow whole communes, so a neighbour sharing a commune can show up here too.
Boundary drawn from whole communes, so it is a little larger than the legal zone. Boundary: Eurac Research PDO inventory (CC0). Country outlines: Natural Earth. Dots on the zone map are the vineyard points used for climate.
Showing every colour The colour filter changes the rules and grapes. Climate, vintages and soils describe the vineyards, so they stay the same.
01 · What the law says
The rules
Limits on grapes, yields, ripeness and ageing that every wine labelled Мелник must meet.
Other varieties allowed
Besides the main grapes, the rules allow these varieties in some wines. Grape names link where a profile exists.
1 varieties · Мелник red wine
In the vineyard and cellar: rules for every wine
1,112
Vines per hectare, minimum
Training
Systems allowed
umbrella; Moser; mid-wire bilateral cordon; Guyot; goblet
Cellar
Where the wine must be made
Within the production zone
02 · Climate fingerprint
The climate
The growing season averages 19.7 °C, hot on Gregory Jones's scale, with 2,079 growing degree days (Winkler IV).
The average year 1991–2020, vineyards at about 351 m
Monthly mean, °CRain, mmGrowing season
- Growing-season temperature
- 19.7 °C
- Hot · 19–21 °C (Jones)
- Growing degree days
- 2,079
- Region IV: 1,944–2,221 degree days
- Growing-season rain
- 362 mm
- Of 707 mm a year
- Harvest rain
- 104 mm
- September–October
Copernicus ERA5-Land monthly averages at 5 vineyard points (Vineyard point 1, 165 m; Vineyard point 2, 627 m; Vineyard point 3, 110 m; Vineyard point 4, 548 m; Vineyard point 5, 307 m), moved to each point's height from the model's terrain. Indices that need daily data are not captured yet. How the climate figures are made.
Lower confidence:Monthly reanalysis in complex terrain (height corrections up to 3.0 °C); absolute values may be several degrees out, year-to-year changes are more reliable.
Closest climates in the database
Picked by the data, not by hand: the profiles nearest on season warmth (counted twice), degree days, rain, ripening-month nights and day–night range. Neighbours within 30 km are left out, as they share the same weather.
1. Rosso CòneroVery similarCompared with Мелник: same season warmth, similar rain.
2. CòneroVery similarCompared with Мелник: same season warmth, similar rain.
3. FaroVery similarCompared with Мелник: same season warmth, similar rain.
Growing-season temperature
Growing degree days
Growing-season rain
03 · Year by year
35 vintages
Each column is one growing season: heat above or below the 1991–2020 average, and rain at harvest. Pick a year for the details.
Warmer than averageCooler than averageHarvest rain (Sep–Oct)Average harvest rain, 104 mm
2025
- Growing-season temp.
- Growing degree days
- Harvest rain
- Growing-season rain
- September nights
- Hot days and frosts
Seasons are labelled by harvest year (April–October). Year-to-year changes from ERA5-Land; tested against station records in Alto Adige (r = 0.94 for season temperature at Bolzano). Rain varies more locally, so treat single-season rain with some caution. Vintage ratings, harvest dates and frost or hail events have places in the data model but are not loaded yet.
04 · Where the numbers come from
Sources
- A geospatial inventory of regulatory information for wine protected designations of origin in Europe · Candiago et al., Scientific Data 9, 394 (2022); Eurac Research · CC0
- ERA5-Land monthly averaged data (reanalysis-era5-land-monthly-means) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), Climate Data Store · CC BY 4.0 (Copernicus licence)
- OpenStreetMap vineyard areas (landuse=vineyard), from Geofabrik country extracts · OpenStreetMap contributors · ODbL 1.0
- Copernicus DEM GLO-90 (AWS open data tiles) · European Space Agency / Copernicus · Copernicus DEM licence
- Single document: Мелник (Official Journal C 272, 1.8.2023; and the product specification 'PDO_Melnik.pdf' from the EU register) · European Union, Official Journal (C series) · EU law (Commission reuse policy)
- Appellation nesting worked out from boundaries (pipeline/build_nesting.py) · Vinous, from the Eurac PDO boundaries · CC0 (source data)
- Climate profiles calculated by Vinous: method
Still to check (3)
- Generated from EU reference data: check against the current product specification.
- From the specification: Wines may be single-varietal or cuvées of the listed varieties for each colour; ageing in oak barrels is permitted. Training systems include umbrella, Moser, mid-wire bilateral cordon, Guyot and goblet, with up to 54 buds per vine and at most 5 000 vines per hectare (no minimum density stated). The 2011 national product specification covers only the guaranteed and controlled designation (ГКНП) from Drangovo: red and rosé wine from Merlot alone, residual sugar up to 4 g/l (or 9 g/l with acidity no more than 2 g/l below it), and traditional terms such as Reserve and Special Reserve without their own limits; the single document's wider variety list is kept.
- National tier (DOC/DOCG) not captured yet; rules extracted from the specification text.