What is made here
Wine colours
The only colour the rules allow.
Where it is
Boca in Italy
- Latitude
- 45.6°–45.7° N
- Vineyard altitude
- 348 m to 468 m
- Production zone
- 5,510 ha
Lies within
Colline Novaresi, Piemonte
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 Boca must meet.
Blend rules
Boca
- 70–90% Nebbiolo (Spanna) · Main grape
- 10–30% Vespolina / Uva rara (Bonarda novarese) · Allowed
At least 34 months' ageing; release from 1 September of the third year after the harvest.
Blend rules
Boca Riserva
- 70–90% Nebbiolo (Spanna) · Main grape
- 10–30% Vespolina / Uva rara (Bonarda novarese) · Allowed
At least 46 months' ageing; release from 1 September of the fourth year after the harvest.
In the vineyard and cellar: rules for every wine
3,000
Vines per hectare, minimum
300–550 m
Vineyard altitude allowed
No forcing
Forcing the vines is prohibited
Prohibited
Irrigation
Cellar
Where the wine must be made
Within the production zone
02 · Climate fingerprint
The climate
The growing season averages 16.1 °C, intermediate on Gregory Jones's scale, with 1,323 growing degree days (Winkler Ib).
The average year 1991–2020, vineyards at about 382 m
Monthly mean, °CRain, mmGrowing season
- Growing-season temperature
- 16.1 °C
- Intermediate · 15–17 °C (Jones)
- Growing degree days
- 1,323
- Region Ib: 1,111–1,388 degree days
- Growing-season rain
- 1,311 mm
- Of 1,908 mm a year
- Harvest rain
- 430 mm
- September–October
Copernicus ERA5-Land monthly averages at 5 vineyard points (Vineyard point 1, 430 m; Vineyard point 2, 339 m; Vineyard point 3, 348 m; Vineyard point 4, 409 m; Vineyard point 5, 386 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. Colline SaluzzesiVery similarCompared with Boca: −0.3 °C in the growing season, drier (−242 mm).
2. PiemonteVery similarCompared with Boca: same season warmth, drier (−285 mm).
3. RamandoloVery similarCompared with Boca: same season warmth, drier (−281 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, 430 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
- Disciplinare di produzione: Boca · Ministero dell'agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste (MASAF) · 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: Article 1 is missing from the input. Vinification, ageing and bottling may take place in listed communes of the provinces of Novara, Vercelli and Biella. Wine output is written as 5.600 litres/ha (56 hl/ha), left null. The 'vigna' wines need minimum total alcohol 12,00% (Boca) and 12,50% (riserva). Ageing durations are in months per the table (unit not written).
- National tier (DOC/DOCG) not captured yet; rules extracted from the specification text.