Terroir 1996 banner
IVES 9 IVES Conference Series 9 Review of the delimited zone of the AOC Saint-Joseph

Review of the delimited zone of the AOC Saint-Joseph

Abstract

L’appellation d’origine contrôlée repose sur une définition précise de l’aire de production du raisin. Cette délimitation définie par l’Institut National des Appellations d’Origine est proposée par des experts choisis pour leurs compétences dans le domaine de la connaissance de la relation terroir – vins, après avis du syndicat de défense de chaque AOC. L’exemple choisi concerne l’AOC St Joseph située dans les Cotes du Rhône dites Septentrionales. Celle-ci avait été définie en 1956 sur 6 communes autour de Tournon en Ardèche. Elle fut étendue à 20 autres communes en 1969. A cette époque, les experts ont pris en compte l’incertitude vis-à-vis de l’avenir viticole des coteaux qui dominent la vallée du Rhône. En effet, pour les entretenir, ceux-ci nécessitaient des ressources humaines qui commençaient à se faire rare. Cette idée conduisit ainsi à délimiter une zone de production assez large afin d’étendre l’appellation à des terrains compatibles avec les moyens modernes d’exploitation liés à la mécanisation. Au milieu des années 1980,dans sa sagesse, la réflexion du syndicat de défense de l’appellation vis à vis de l’avenir de l’AOC St Joseph l’amènera, à prendre conscience de la dérive qui pouvait conduire à une banalisation des vins de l’AOC St Joseph du fait de la délocalisation du vignoble permise par la décision de 1969. Dès 1986, le syndicat demande alors à l’INAO la possibilité d’engager une révision de l’aire délimitée pour respecter l’implantation en coteaux de la vigne,situation qui a fait la notoriété de cette AOC. Après de nombreux travaux sur le terrain et après un long travail de persuasion des différents acteurs de l’appellation, une nouvelle délimitation vit le jour en 1994. Ainsi, l’aire de production potentielle est désormais réduite de 6850 ha à 3400 ha afin de recentrer le vignoble sur les coteaux, éléments fondateurs de cette appellation. Cette opération conduisit également à exclure des vignes déjà plantées: sur 755 ha de vignes que comportait l’AOC en 1992, 170 ha furent éliminés. Des mesures d’accompagnement notamment incitation financière pour planter dans les coteaux ont été retenues et ont permis de faire accepter cette opération douloureuse. Aujourd’hui le recentrage du vignoble dans les coteaux a permis de recadrer l’image de l’AOC St Joseph et de mieux affirmer l’identité de ses vins. Elle a permis également de faire revivre le paysage viticole des coteaux dominant la vallée du Rhône dans des conditions économiques satisfaisantes permettant une meilleure valorisation du produit. Des mesures d’accompagnement notamment incitation financière pour planter dans les coteaux ont été retenues et ont permis de faire accepter cette opération douloureuse. Aujourd’hui le recentrage du vignoble dans les coteaux a permis de recadrer l’image de l’AOC St Joseph et de mieux affirmer l’identité de ses vins. Elle a permis également de faire revivre le paysage viticole des coteaux dominant la vallée du Rhône dans des conditions économiques satisfaisantes permettant une meilleure valorisation du produit. Cet exemple montre qu’un travail d’experts, réalisé en lien avec les «porteurs de mémoire» que représente le syndicat de défense d’une AOC permet de retrouver les éléments fondamentaux qui constituent le «terroir» de l’AOC St Joseph: un paysage, des vignes en coteaux et un savoir-faire dans un milieu difficile pour révéler un vin prestigieux.

DOI:

Publication date: February 3, 2022

Issue: Terroir 2002

Type: Article

Authors

Gilbert FRIBOURG

Institut National des Appellations, 17, Rue Jacquard ZI des Auréats, 26000 VALENCE

Keywords

appellation d’origine, délimitation, révision, coteaux, AOC St Joseph

Tags

IVES Conference Series | Terroir 2002

Citation

Related articles…

Rapid damage assessment and grapevine recovery after fire

There is increasing scientific consensus that climate changeis the underlying cause of the prolonged dry and hot conditions that have increased the risk of extreme fire weather in many countries around the world. In December 2019, a bushfire event occurred in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia where 25,000 hectares were burnt and in vineyards and surrounding areas various degrees of scorching and infrastructure damage occurred. The ability to coordinate and plan recovery after a fire event relies on robust and timely data. The current practice for measuring the scale and distribution of fire damage is to walk or drive the vineyard and score individual vines based on visual observation. The process is time consuming, subjective, or semi-quantitative at best. After the December 2019 fires, it took many months to access properties and estimate the area of vineyard damaged. This study compares the rapid assessment and mapping of fire damage using high-resolution satellite imagery with more traditional ground based measures. Satellite imagery tracking vineyard recovery in the season following the bushfire is being correlated to field assessments of vineyard productivity such as canopy health and development, fertility and carbohydrate storage. Canopy health in the seasons following the fires correlated to the severity of the initial fire damage. Severely damaged vines had reduced canopy growth, were infertile or had very low fertility as well as lower carbohydrate levels in buds and canes during dormancy, which reduced productivity in the seasons following the bushfire event. In contrast, vines that received minor damage were able to recover within 1-2 years. Tools that rapidly and affordably capture the extent and severity of damage over large vineyard area will allow producers, government and industry bodies to manage decisions in relation to fire recovery planning, coordination and delivery, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their response.

VINIoT – Precision viticulture service

The project VINIoT pursues the creation of a new technological vineyard monitoring service, which will allow companies in the wine sector in the SUDOE space to monitor plantations in real time and remotely at various levels of precision. The system is based on spectral images and an IoT architecture that allows assessing parameters of interest viticulture and the collection of data at a precise scale (level of grape, plant, plot or vineyard) will be designed. In France, three subjects were specifically developed: evaluation of maturity, of water stress, and detection of flavescence dorée. For the evaluation of maturity, it has been decided first to work at the berry scale in the laboratory, then at the bunch scale and finally in the vineyard. The acquisition of the spectral hyperstal image as well as the reference analyzes to measure the maturity, were carried out in the laboratory after harvesting the berries in a maturity monitoring context. This work focuses on a case study to predict sugar content of three different grape varieties: Syrah, Fer Servadou and Mauzac. A robust method called Roboost-PLSR, developed in the framework of this work (Courand et al., 2022), to improve prediction model performance was applied on spectra after the acquirement of hyperspectral images. Regarding the evaluation of water stress, to work with a significant variability in terms of water status, it has been worked first with potted plants under 2 different water regimes. The facilities have allowed the supervision of irrigation and micro-climatic conditions. The regression models on agronomic variables (stomatal conductance, water potential, …) are studied. To detect flavescence dorée, the experimental plan has consisted of work at leaf scale in the laboratory first, and then in the field. To detect the disease from hyper-spectral imaging, a combination of multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) and factorial discriminant analysis (FDA) was proposed. This strategy proved the potential towards the discrimination of healthy and infected leaves by flavescence dorée based on the use of hyperspectral images (Mas Garcia et al., 2021).

What are the optimal ranges and thresholds for berry solar radiation for flavonoid biosynthesis?

In wine grape production, canopy management practices are applied to control the source-sink balance and improve the cluster microclimate to enhance berry composition. The aim of this study was to identify the optimal ranges of berry solar radiation exposure (exposure) for upregulation of flavonoid biosynthesis and thresholds for their degradation, to evaluate how canopy management practices such as leaf removal, shoot thinning, and a combination of both affect the grapevine (Vitis vinifera L. cv. Cabernet Sauvignon) yield components, berry composition, and flavonoid profile under context of climate change. First experiment assessed changes in the grape flavonoid content driven by four degrees of exposure. In the second experiment, individual grape berries subjected to different exposures were collected from two cultivars (Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot). The third experiment consisted of an experiment with three canopy management treatments (i) LR (removal of 5 to 6 basal leaves), (ii) ST (thinned to 24 shoots per vine), and (iii) LRST (a combination of LR and ST) and an untreated control (UNT). Berry composition, flavonoid content and profiles, and 3-isobutyl 2-methoxypyrazine were monitored during berry ripening. Although increasing canopy porosity through canopy management practices can be helpful for other purposes, this may not be the case of flavonoid compounds when a certain proportion of kaempferol was achieved. Our results revealed different sensitivities to degradation within the flavonoid groups, flavonols being the only monitored group that was upregulated by solar radiation. Within different canopy management practices, the main effects were due to the ST. Under environmental conditions given in this trial, ST and LRST hastened fruit maturity; however, a clear improvement of the flavonoid compounds (i.e., greater anthocyanin) was not observed at harvest. Methoxypyrazine berry content decreased with canopy management practices studied. Although some berry traits were improved (i.e. 2.5° Brix increase in berry total soluble solids) due to canopy management practices (ST), this resulted in a four-fold increase in labor operations cost, two-fold decrease in yield with a 10-fold increase in anthocyanin production cost per hectare that should be assessed together as the climate continues to get hot.

Towards a regional mapping of vine water status based on crowdsourcing observations

Monitoring vine water status is a major challenge for vineyard management because it influences both yield and harvest quality. It is also a challenge at the territorial scale for identifying periods of high water restriction or zones regularly impacted by water stress. This information is of major importance for defining collective strategies, anticipating harvest logistic or applying for irrigation authorisation. At this spatial scale, existing tools and methods for monitoring vine water status are few and often require strong assumptions (e.g. water balance model). This paper proposes to consider a collaborative collection of observations by winegrowers and wine industry stakeholders (crowdsourcing) as an interesting alternative. Indeed, it allows the collection of a large number of field observations while pooling the collection effort. However, the feasibility of such a project and its interest in monitoring vine water status at regional scale has never been tested.

The objective of this article is to explore the possibility of making a regional map of vine water status based on crowdsourcing observations. It is based on the study of the free mobile application ApeX-Vigne, which allows the collection of observations about vine shoot growth. This information is easy to collect and can be considered, under certain conditions, as a proxy for vine water status. This article presents the first results obtained from the nearly 18,000 observations collected by winegrowers and wine industry stakeholders during 2019, 2020 and 2021 seasons. It presents the vine shoot growth maps obtained at regional scale and their evolution over the three vintages studied. It also proposes an analysis of the factors that favoured the number of observations collected and those that favoured their quality. These results open up new perspectives for monitoring vine water status at a regional scale but above they provide references for other crowdsourcing projects in viticulture.

First step in the preparation of a soil map of the Protected Designation of Origin Valdepeñas (Central, Spain)

This work is a first step to make a map of vineyard soils. The characterization of the soils of the Protected Designation of Origin (D.P.O.) Valdepeñas will allow to group the studied profiles according to their physico-chemical characteristics and the concentrations of most relevant chemical elements. 90 soil profiles were analysed throughout the territory and the soils were sampled and described according to FAO (2006) and classified according to and Soil Taxonomy (2014). All samples were air dried, sieved and some physico-chemical parameters were determined following standard protocols. Also, major and trace elements were analysed by X-ray fluorescence. The statistically study was made using the SPSS program. Trend maps were made using the ArcGIS program. The studied soils have the following average properties: pH, 8.3; electrical conductivity, 0,20 dS/m (low); clay, 18.8% (medium) and CaCO3, 17.1% (high). In the study for the major elements. The major elements of these soils are Si, followed by Ca and Al, with an average content of 203.7 g/kg, 105.5 g/kg and 74.0 g/kg respectively. On the other hand, 27 trace elements have been studied. Of all of them, it can be highlighted the average values of Ba (361.8 mg/kg), Sr (129.3 mg/kg), Rb (83.4 mg/kg), V (74.2 mg/kg) and Ce (70.6 mg/kg). Ba, V and Ce values are higher and the values of Sr and Rb are lower to those found in the literature. The discriminant analysis shows a percentage of grouping of 91%. The content of chemical elements together with the physico-chemical characteristics allows grouping the soils in 4 group according to their order in the classification to Soil Taxonomy; due to the importance of the Calcisols in Castilla-La Mancha, it has been decided to establish them as their own group even if they do not appear in Soil Taxonomy classification.