Un Système d’Informations à Références Spatiales sur le Vignoble. Un outil performant d’aide aux recherches sur la caractérisation des terroirs viticoles

According to the Kyoto Protocol objectives, it’s necessary to identify alternative carbon dioxide sinks, and vineyard soils could be a significant opportunity.

This work gives a summary of the most important programmes about viticultural « terroirs », developed on the « Côtes du Rhône » controlled appellation area for about twenty years.

Phenolic compounds play a central role in sensory characteristics of wine, such as colour, mouthfeel, flavour and determine its shelf life. Furthermore, the major non-enzymatic wine oxidation process is due to the catalytic oxidation of phenols in quinones. Due their importance, during the years have been developed different analytical methods to monitor the concentration of phenols in wine, such as Folin-Ciocalteu method, spectrophotometric techniques and HPLC. These methods can also be used to follow some oxidation-related chemical transformations.

One of the most concerning trends associated with increasing heat and water stress is advanced ripening of grapes, which leads to harvesting fruit at higher sugar concentrations but lacking optimal phenolic (i.e. color and mouthfeel) and aromatic maturity. Mitigation techniques for this phenomenon have been studied for many years and practices to delay sugar accumulation have been identified, including antitranspirants, delayed pruning and late-source-limitation techniques. Evaluation of the efficacy of these vineyard practices has occurred across a wide range of environments, vintages, varieties and growing conditions. To assess the broader efficacy of these three vineyard practices, which are easy-to-implement and cost-effective, a meta-analytic approach was adopted using data retrieved from 43 original studies.

Sulfites (SO2) are commonly used in the wine industry to preserve products during storage for antiseptic and antioxidant purposes (Oliveira et al., 2011).