What is made here
Wine colours
Colours the rules allow. Pick a colour to filter the rules and grapes below.
Where it is
Alicante in Spain
- Latitude
- 37.9°–38.9° N
- Vineyard altitude
- 71 m to 686 m
- Production zone
- 617,026 ha
Covers the same area as
Valdeorras
Contains 1 appellation (outlined on the zone map)
Yecla
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 Alicante must meet.
Other varieties allowed
Besides the main grapes, the rules allow these varieties in some wines. Grape names link where a profile exists.
18 varieties · Alicante liqueur wines, Alicante sparkling wines
Airén, Alarije, Bobal, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Grenache, Macabeo, Merlot, Merseguera, Moscatel de Alejandria, Mourvèdre, Petit Verdot, Pinot Noir, Planta Fina de Pedralba, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, Tempranillo, Verdil
1 varieties ·
In the vineyard and cellar: rules for every wine
2,500
Vines per hectare, minimum
Permitted
Irrigation
02 · Climate fingerprint
The climate
The growing season averages 21.0 °C, very hot on Gregory Jones's scale, with 2,351 growing degree days (Winkler V).
The average year 1991–2020, vineyards at about 348 m
Monthly mean, °CRain, mmGrowing season
- Growing-season temperature
- 21.0 °C
- Very hot · above 21 °C (Jones)
- Growing degree days
- 2,351
- Region V: 2,222 and over degree days
- Growing-season rain
- 202 mm
- Of 375 mm a year
- Harvest rain
- 90 mm
- September–October
Copernicus ERA5-Land monthly averages at 5 vineyard points (Vineyard point 1, 505 m; Vineyard point 2, 31 m; Vineyard point 3, 466 m; Vineyard point 4, 29 m; Vineyard point 5, 708 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 moderately complex terrain; not yet checked against a weather station.
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. VittoriaVery similarCompared with Alicante: same season warmth, similar rain.
2. Cerasuolo di VittoriaVery similarCompared with Alicante: same season warmth, similar rain.
3. Nasco di CagliariVery similarCompared with Alicante: same season warmth, wetter (+24 mm).
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, 90 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: Alicante (Official Journal C, C/2024/4680, 25.7.2024; and the technical file 'Ares(2015)279866' 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: Section 7 lists 35 varieties (Airén, Alarije – Subirat Parent, Bobal, Bonicaire, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Monastrell, Moscatel de Alejandría and others) without shares. White and rosé wines share one set of analytical limits, including aged white and aged rosé ('noble', 'añejo') wines; yields are given only by white and red varieties. Fondillón is made from overripe Monastrell grapes with local yeasts only, its 16 % alcohol must be entirely natural, and it may be aged by añada or criaderas y solera (age calculated as arithmetic mean); 'Moscatel de Alicante' liqueur and sweet wines may use concentrated must. Wines must be packaged in the production area. The national technical file sets minimum planting density at 2,500 vines/ha for dry-farmed and 3,500 vines/ha for irrigated vineyards, and an extraction yield of 0.74 hl of wine per 100 kg of grapes. It gives lower maximum yields (9,000 kg/ha and 66.6 hl/ha for white varieties, 7,500 kg/ha and 55.5 hl/ha for red) than the single document recorded here; the single-document figures are kept.
- National tier (DOC/DOCG) not captured yet; rules extracted from the specification text.