In viticulture as in other crop productions, adaptation to climate fluctuations is needed to mitigate their possible impacts on productivity and on the quality of products. The VERDI simulation model was developed to evaluate various adaptive strategies of intercrop management at field scale. Its main purposes were to design management strategies that are responsive to the state of the soil-crop system and to climate, and to reproduce realistically the dynamic interactions between the biophysical and decision systems in varying climate conditions. A simulation study involving various more or less adaptive strategies of soil surface management under different climate scenarios was carried out. The simulation outputs confirmed that in case of severe drought, the most flexible strategy yields the best agronomic and environmental results in the long term, in relation to its ability to trigger the removal of an intercrop according to the time-course of soil water availability.