What is made here
Wine colours
The only colour the rules allow.
Where it is
Côtes de Blaye in France
- Latitude
- 45.0°–45.3° N
- Vineyard altitude
- 5 m to 65 m
- Production zone
- 62,253 ha
Covers the same area as
Blaye
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.
01 · What the law says
The rules
Limits on grapes, yields, ripeness and ageing that every wine labelled Côtes de Blaye must meet.
Blend rules
Côtes de Blaye
- 60–90% colombard / ugni blanc · Main grape
- – muscadelle / sauvignon / sauvignon gris / sémillon · Allowed
Other varieties allowed
Besides the main grapes, the rules allow these varieties in some wines. Grape names link where a profile exists.
4 varieties · Côtes de Blaye
In the vineyard and cellar: rules for every wine
4,500
Vines per hectare, minimum
Training
Systems allowed
taille Guyot simple; taille Guyot double; cordon bas palissé
02 · Climate fingerprint
The climate
The growing season averages 17.5 °C, warm on Gregory Jones's scale, with 1,611 growing degree days (Winkler II).
The average year 1991–2020, vineyards at about 43 m
Monthly mean, °CRain, mmGrowing season
- Growing-season temperature
- 17.5 °C
- Warm · 17–19 °C (Jones)
- Growing degree days
- 1,611
- Region II: 1,389–1,666 degree days
- Growing-season rain
- 445 mm
- Of 793 mm a year
- Harvest rain
- 134 mm
- September–October
Copernicus ERA5-Land monthly averages at 5 vineyard points (Vineyard point 1, 38 m; Vineyard point 2, 56 m; Vineyard point 3, 68 m; Vineyard point 4, 54 m; Vineyard point 5, 1 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.
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. SzekszárdVery similarCompared with Côtes de Blaye: same season warmth, similar rain.
2. СлавянциVery similarCompared with Côtes de Blaye: same season warmth, similar rain.
3. Puisseguin Saint-EmilionVery similarCompared with Côtes de Blaye: 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, 134 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
- Quality wines in Italy and France: a dataset of PDO specifications · figshare 25393261 · CC BY 4.0
- 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
- Cahier des charges: Côtes de Blaye (Côte de Beaune-Villages) · Ministère de l'Agriculture (Bulletin officiel), as linked by INAO · Official act
- 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: Dry white wine only. Grapes of sauvignon B and sauvignon gris G need 178 g/l sugar (170 g/l for the others); in the blend the principal grapes must be at least 50%. Not recorded because the checker cannot read numbers with a space as thousands separator: minimum density 4 500 plants/ha and maximum average parcel load 9 500 kg/ha (17 bunches per vine).
- National tier (DOC/DOCG) not captured yet; rules extracted from the specification text.