Characterization of vineyard sites for quality wine production using meteorological, soil chemical and physical data

The use of cover crops (CCs) is widely proposed as an alternative to traditional soil management in vineyards to exploit a wide range of ecosystem services. The presence of a CC in the inter-row space is known to control spontaneous vegetation in vineyards, primarily through the biomass of the sown crop, which competes with other spontaneous species for soil resources.

Context and purpose of the study. Heatwaves have become more frequent and intense in several winegrowing regions.

The wine closure industry is mainly divided into three categories: screw caps, synthetic closures, and cork-based closures. Among this latter, microagglomerated cork stoppers treated with supercritical CO2 are now widely used, especially to avoid cork taint contaminations[1]. They are designed with cork granules obtained from cork offcuts of the punching process during the natural cork stoppers production. A previous study[2] showed that these stoppers released fewer polyphenols in 12 % (v/v) hydroalcoholic solution than natural cork stoppers.

In Italy, in the past two decades, the rate of temperature increases (0.0369 °C per year) was slightly higher compared to the world average (0.0313 °C per year). It has also been indicated that the number and intensity of heat waves have increased considerably in the last decades. (IEA, 2022). Viticultural zones can be classified with climatic indexes. Huglin’s index (HI) considers the temperature in a definite area and has been considered as reliable to evaluate the thermal suitability for winegrape production (Zhang et al., 2023).

Quercetin precipitation has become an increasingly common issue in red wine, often resulting in visually unpleasant sediments and diminished product quality.