Editorial: Biogeosciences and Wine: The Management and Environmental Processes That Regulate the Terroir Effect in Space and Time

Viticultural terroir is formally defined by the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV, 2010) as “a concept which refers to an area in which collective knowledge of the interactions between the identifiable physical and biological environment and applied vitivinicultural practices develops, providing distinctive characteristics for the products originating from this area”. Though the OIV’s definition does mention neither the time perspective inherent with terroir shaping nor its facet of cultural inheritance, which are important aspects, the study of terroir includes multidisciplinary approaches accounting for soil, geomorphology, morphometry, climate, as well as vineyard management, grapevine genotypes, historical know-how, and experiments, in addition to oenological practices (Deloire et al., 2005; Van Leeuwen and Seguin, 2006; Vaudour et al., 2015). However, time-rooted scientific questions about sustainability, the resilience of the vineyard system (Vaudour et al., 2017; Bonfante et al., 2018; Costantini et al., 2018), efficiency, and traceability have recently emerged. This Research Topic groups several innovative studies about these key issues and the approaches that were carried out for studying the terroir as a complex system, especially under climate change.