La zonazione in due zone viticole dell’emilia Romagna

Grapevine breeding focuses on high wine quality and climate-adapted grapevine varieties with fungal disease resistances to be cultivated in a pesticide-reduced and sustainable viticulture.

Oligosaccharides have only recently been characterized in wine, and the information on composition and content is still limited. In wine, these molecules are mainly natural byproducts of the degradation of grape berry cell wall polysaccharides. Wine oligosaccharides present several physicochemical properties, being one relevant factor linked to the astringency perception of wines (1,2). A terroir can be defined as a grouping of homogeneous environmental units based on the typicality of the products obtained. This notion is particularly associated with wine, being the climate and the soil two of the major elements of terroir concept.

In the context of sustainable viticulture, modern and efficient techniques to determine water status are required to optimize irrigation practices. Proximal techniques such as thermography and spectroscopy have shown promising results. When these techniques are incorporated into mobile systems is possible to evaluate the water status on-the-go, offering the possibility to generate variability maps. However, in most cases, complex protocols of data acquisition and analysis are required. Also, the inherent physiological behaviour of the plants under certain water stress conditions needs to be considered. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of scion-rootstock combinations on the performance of a predefined plant-based method based on proximal near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy.

The quality of wine is assessed, among other things, by its color, which is mainly due to its anthocyanin content. These pigments are polyphenols that give red, purple and blue hues depending on the relative proportion of anthocyanins produced by the action of flavonoid 3’5′ hydroxylase (delphinidin-3-glucoside, petunidin-3-glucoside, malvidin-3-glucoside) or flavonoid 3′ hydroxylase (cyanidin-3-glucoside, peonidin-3-glucoside). To study the genes involved in this biosynthetic pathway, we focused on Vitis vinifera cv. Tannat, known for producing wines with higher anthocyanin content and darker purple color compared to most red grape varieties. In this work, we have performed RNA-Seq analysis of skins during berry development, taking green and red berries at 50% veraison as separate samples, as an experimental strategy to focus on the differential expression of genes of interest.

A critical aspect of wine quality is the overall expression of wine flavour, which is formed by the interplay of volatile aroma compounds, their precursors, and taste and matrix components.
Grapes directly contribute to wine only a small number of potent aroma compounds, and the unique
sensory attributes and perceived quality of a wine result from combining 100s of metabolites of grapes, yeast and bacteria, and oak wood.