What is made here
Wine colours
Colours the rules allow. Pick a colour to filter the rules and grapes below.
Where it is
Empordà in Spain
- Latitude
- 41.8°–42.5° N
- Vineyard altitude
- 13 m to 182 m
- Production zone
- 131,303 ha
Lies within
Cataluña
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 Empordà must meet.
Other varieties allowed
Besides the main grapes, the rules allow these varieties in some wines. Grape names link where a profile exists.
20 varieties · 5 wines
Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Garnacha Blanca, Garnacha Peluda, Garnacha Roja, Gewürztraminer, Grenache, Macabeo, Malvasía Aromatica, Mazuela, Merlot, Moscatel de Alejandria, Moscatel de Grano Menudo, Mourvèdre, Picapoll Blanco, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah, Tempranillo, Xarello
In the vineyard and cellar: rules for every wine
2,900
Vines per hectare, minimum
Permitted
Irrigation
02 · Climate fingerprint
The climate
The growing season averages 19.2 °C, hot on Gregory Jones's scale, with 1,959 growing degree days (Winkler IV).
The average year 1991–2020, vineyards at about 97 m
Monthly mean, °CRain, mmGrowing season
- Growing-season temperature
- 19.2 °C
- Hot · 19–21 °C (Jones)
- Growing degree days
- 1,959
- Region IV: 1,944–2,221 degree days
- Growing-season rain
- 364 mm
- Of 680 mm a year
- Harvest rain
- 162 mm
- September–October
Copernicus ERA5-Land monthly averages at 5 vineyard points (Vineyard point 1, 54 m; Vineyard point 2, 40 m; Vineyard point 3, 264 m; Vineyard point 4, 114 m; Vineyard point 5, 13 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. СакарVery similarCompared with Empordà: same season warmth, similar rain.
2. Côtes de ProvenceVery similarCompared with Empordà: same season warmth, similar rain.
3. ЛомVery similarCompared with Empordà: 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, 162 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: Empordà (Official Journal C, C/2025/4117, 24.7.2025; and the technical file 'Ares(2014)2158248' 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 4 gives analytical limits only for white, rosé and red wines; the liqueur, quality sparkling, semi-sparkling and overripe-grape categories have none (grapes for sparkling and semi-sparkling wine need 9.5 % natural strength), and rosé yields follow the white or red variety limits. Section 7 lists 23 varieties without shares. Garnacha de Empordà 'vieja reserva' needs more than 10 years in oak; 'vino de guarda' needs 12 months in oak barrels of at most 330 litres; Garnacha and Moscatel de Empordà may be called natural sweet wines from musts above 252 g/l sugar. Wines must be bottled within the area. The older national technical file gives semi-sparkling (vino de aguja, 9.5 % vol) and overripe-grape wine (natural 18 % vol, actual 15 % vol) their own limits, added as products; it also differs from the single document on several kept values: minimum total acidity 4.5 g/l (not 4), actual strength 11.5 % vol for rosé and red, and wine yields of 54 hl/ha for white and 70 hl/ha for red varieties.
- National tier (DOC/DOCG) not captured yet; rules extracted from the specification text.