The social construction of wine-growing areas: the “Graves de Bordeaux”

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in characterizing the ecological environment of vineyard production, and the growing need to delimit and characterize with precision the different homogeneous viticultural units. This has allowed the development of new studies which have as their objective the Vineyard Zoning. The delimitation and characterization of wine-growing areas poses specific problems in Spain, not only linked to the specific characteristics of the territory, but also to the size, distribution and index of viticultural occupation in the designations of origin.

The climate change is afecting particulary to the South of Spain, with high temperatures. It is important to develop new strategies in order to mantain the quality of wines

Conventional vineyard practices have lead in many environmental disturbances as erosion, soil compaction, loss of organic matter and soil biodiversity, water contamination

Ozalj- vivodina region is small vine growing area (only about 100 hectares of vineyards), but with significant number of old, ancient vineyards planted between 50 and 100 years ago. Trend of abandoning or replanting ancient vineyards takes place for the last 30 years. This trend results in grapevine germplasm erosion because traditional varieties are replaced with well known international varieties.Few known traditional varieties are dominantly present in ancient vineyards together with many others of unknown identity. Historical data about prevalence and characteristic of varieties on this area are very poor.

Context and purpose of the study. Nitrogen (N) limitation enhances the production of phenolic compounds in grapes due to the downregulation of the flavonoid biosynthesis pathway.