Climat et sol: critères d’évaluation et effets sur le comportement de la vigne

Green cover in vine rows provides many ecological services, but can also negatively impact the crop, depending on the weed species. The composition of a vineyard weed community is influenced by many parameters. Ensuring an evolution of the vine row flora into a desired direction is therefore very complex. A key step towards this goal is to know which factors influence the establishment of the weed community and which types of communities are best suited for vineyards. In this study, we analysed the weed communities of several vineyards in the Lake Geneva region (379 botanical surveys on 117 plots), with the aim to highlight the links between soil management practices (chemical and mechanical weeding, mowing, mulching roll) and phytosociological profiles, biodiversity and selected functional traits (growth forms, life strategies, root depth). T

In the last few decades, minor vine genotypes traditionally cultivated on the Mount Etna slopes, have attracted the interest of both researchers and vine growers, as they offer an interesting oenological profile.

One of the major challenges for food security and sovereignty is to produce stress-tolerant plants without introducing foreign DNA, because the legislative process, that bans transgenics, challenges us to find new solutions for producing plants that can survive the drought. To achieve this goal, we need to identify genes that can be modified to improve stress tolerance in plants. In this work, we present an online tool for exploring the transcriptome of grapevines under water stress, which is one of the most important abiotic stresses affecting viticulture. The tool is based on a comprehensive collection of rna-seq data from 997 experiments, covering four different tissues (leaf, root, berry, and shoot), various levels of water stress, and diverse genetic backgrounds (cultivars and rootstocks) with different levels of tolerance to water stress.

The objective of this study is to review the scientific evidences and to advance into the knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of astringency. Astringency has been described as the drying, roughing and puckering sensation perceived when some food and beverages are tasted (1). The main, but possibly not the only, mechanism for the astringency is the precipitation of salivary proteins (2,3). Between phenolic compounds found in red wines, flavan-3-ols are the group usually related to the development of this sensation. Other compounds, phenolic or not, like anthocyanins, polysaccharides and mannoproteins could act modifying or modulating astringency perception by hindering the interaction between flavanols and salivary proteins either because of their interaction with the flavanols or because of their interaction with the salivary proteins.

The Douro Demarcated Region, in Northern Portugal, offers outstanding wines with unique characteristics. Due to the today’s globalized marketplace, local producers often need to further develop their cultivation techniques to remain competitive. The Association of Viticultural Development in the Douro Valley (ADVID) works as a unit of experimentation, offering services and training to meet the demands of the Douro’s vitiviniculturists.