Modelling Climate Change Effects on Wine Quality Based on Expert Opinions Expressed in Free-Text Format: The WEBSOM Approach

The motivation for modelling the effects of climate change on viticulture and wine quality using both qualitative and quantitative data within an integrated analytical framework is described. The major constraints and solutions evident when taking such an approach are outlined. WEBSOM is a novel self-organising map (SOM) method for extracting relevant domain-dependent characteristics from web based text and in this case applied to modelling wine quality determined by climate variation, by web text mining a sample of 95 New Zealand wine published descriptions made by sommeliers about this phenomenon. This paper describes experiments using the WEBSOM method with their results.