Cultivation forms and viticulture models adapting to adverse “environmental” conditions

Aging red wines in oak barrels is an expensive and laborious process that can only be applied to wines with a certain added value. For this reason, the use of oak alternatives coupled with micro-oxygenation has progressively increased over recent years, because it can reproduce the processes taking place in the barrels more economically and quickly [1]. Several studies have explored how oak alternatives [2-5] can contribute to wine composition and quality but little is known about the influence of their thickness.

The “Anjou Terroirs” programme aims at bringing the necessary scientific basis for a ratio­nal and reasoned exploitation of the technical itinerary of the terroir. The scale study is 1/12500. For the mapping, many parameters, such as the granulometry or the depth of soil are observed to each point of caracterisation.

Grape growers around the world are seeking to reduce their reliance on herbicides. However, traditional alternatives to chemical weed control do not always integrate seamlessly into established vineyard operations. Employing nonchemical weed management often requires trellis alterations, purchasing or hiring new equipment, and depending on region, may significantly increase tractor passes required to reach desired level of weed control. Critical thinking and thoughtful strategies are necessary to minimize expenditures and maintain quality during the transition away from herbicides. In this trial, irrigation was installed underground in an effort to minimize water loss due to evaporation, better direct the water to the vines, and reduce weed growth in the difficult to control undervine area.

The Languedoc-Roussillon wineries are facing a decline in wine yields particularly PGI yields due to many factors. Climate change is just ones, but is expected to increase in the future. There is also structurally a large heterogeneity of yield profiles among terroirs, varieties and strategies. This work investigates the link between yield, competitiveness and resilience to explore how resilient winegrowers have been in the recent past. To this end two approaches have been combined; (i) an accountancy database analysis at estate scale and (ii) municipality level competitiveness analysis. A new resilience indicator that characterizes the capacity of an estate to absorb yield variation is also defined. The FADN database between 2000 and 2018 of ex-Languedoc-Roussillon (France) and other data are used to analyse the current situation and the past evolution of competitiveness and resilience by type of estate (type of farm: PGI and/or PDO & type of commercialization: bulk and/or bottles). The net margin, which defines competitiveness, is not correlated to yield for all types but depends on the type of commercialization and the level of specialisation. The resilience indicator shows that the net margin of estates specialized in PGI is particularly sensitive to yield declines. We also show that price evolutions seem to compensate the effect of yield losses for the majority of types. Municipality scale analysis shows the links between local pedoclimate, yield, commercialization strategies and price. Overlapping a PDO with a PGI does not always increase a municipality’s PGI competitiveness. It is difficult to make links between causes and effects due to the complexity of the wine production system. Production diversification may be a solution. Resorting to the two level of analysis helps resolving the data gap that is necessary to explore the links between yield and economic performance of the wine estates in the long term.

The main objective of this paper is to establish considerable differences between wines from three wine areas or terroir, made with cv Torrontes Riojano.