Parcours de découverte des terroirs viticoles

The sensory characteristics of wine are a topic studied by several researchers over time, but it continues to be a current and challenging subject. These characteristics are fundamental for the consumer acceptability, which has increasingly aroused their interest to modulate them in line with current market trends and innovation demands. The wine physical-chemical and sensory properties depend on a wide set of factors: they begin to be designed in the vineyard and are later constructed during the various stages of winemaking. Afterwards, the wine is placed in bottles and stored or commercialized.

In the next years the territorial environmental certification could become realistic if the following conditions will be fully satisfied:
– the enhancement of the environmental awareness among the industries, the public administration, the authorization bodies, the living people of that territory as well as the tourists and visitors.

La zonazione viticola rappresenta un importante strumento di indagine per valutare e interpretare le potenzialità produttive e qualitative di un territorio. Con l’obiettivo di studiare come l’ambiente influisca sulla qualità dell’uva nell’areale di Brisighella, sono stati monitorati, nelle annate 2007, 2008 e 2009, 14 vigneti per la varietà Albana e 38 per la varietà Sangiovese, rappresentativi di una area vitata di circa 1000 ha.

The adoption of PIWI (Pilzwiderstandsfähige) grape cultivars, bred for resistance to fungal diseases, is a transformative step towards sustainable winemaking.

Farming management practices aiming at conserving soil moisture have been developed in arid and semiarid-areas facing water scarcity problems. Organic mulching is an effective method to manipulate the crop-growing microclimate increasing crop yield by controlling soil temperature, and retaining soil moisture by reducing soil evaporation. In this sense, the effectiveness of different organic mulching materials (straw mulch and grapevine pruning debris) applied within the row of a vineyard was evaluated on the soil and on the vine in a Tempranillo vineyard located in La Rioja (Spain). Organic mulches were compared with a traditional bare soil management technique (based on the use of herbicides to avoid weed incidence). Mulching coverages favourably influenced the soil water retention throughout all the grapevine vegetative cycle. However, the soil-moisture variation was not the same under different mulching materials, being the straw mulch (SM) the one that retained more water in comparison with grapevine pruning debris (GPD) based-cover. The changes of soil moisture in the upper surface layer (0–10 cm) were highly dynamic, probably due to water vapour fluxes across the soil-atmospheric interface. However, both, SM and GPD reduced these fluctuations as compared with bare soils. A similar trend occurred with soil temperature. Both organic mulches altered soil temperature in comparison with bare soil by reducing soil temperature in summer and raising it in winter. Moreover, the same buffering effect for the temperature on the covered soil also remains in the deeper layers. To conclude, we could see that organic mulching had a positive impact on soil-moisture storage and soil temperature and the extent of this effect depends on the type of mulching materials. These changes led to higher rates of photosynthesis and stomatal conductivity compared to bare soils, also favouring crop growth and grape yields.