L’Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée « Huile Essentielle de Lavande de Haute Provence »

The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica Newman, is considered one of the most harmful organisms due to its ability to feed on more than 300 plant species. Symptoms indicative of adult beetles include feeding holes in host plants extending to skeletonization of leaves when population numbers are high. The vine is one of the species most affected by this beetle. However, the damaged plants, even if with difficulty, manage to recover, bringing the bunches of grapes to ripeness.

The wine industry currently relies on a limited number of grapevine cultivars, comprised of numerous clones with slight differences in their viticultural, oenological, or stress-tolerance traits.

There is a growing interest in the exploitation of vine-shoots waste, since they are often left or burned. Sánchez-Gómez et al. [1] have shown that vines-shoots aqueous extracts have significant contents of bioactive compounds, among which several polyphenols and volatiles are highlighted. Recent studied had demonstrated that the chemical composition of vine-shoots is enhanced when vine-shoots are toasted
[2,3]. The application of vegetable products in the vineyards has led to significant changes towards a more “Sustainable Viticulture”. An innovative foliar application for Airén vine-shoot extracts have been carried out to the vineyard. It has been shown that they act as grape biostimulants, improving certain wine quality characteristics [4].

The tartaric stabilization of wines before bottling to avoid the precipitation of tartaric acid salts is an important and common step during wine production. The presence of precipitated salt crystals in bottle wines is detrimental for their quality and even a legal issue in some countries. Cold stabilization is the most common stabilization treatment. Although it has been shown to be effective, it has some significant disadvantages, mainly regarding losses of color and aromas and its high cost. Therefore, other products and methodologies are being introduced in the wineries for the replacement of this process. Some of these new techniques involve the reduction of the ions causing the insolubilization of tartaric acid while other are based in the formation of protective colloids or the inhibition of the crystallization of salts. In this study, white, rosé and red wines have been treated with carboxymethylcellulose, potassium polyaspartate and an ion exchange resin. The tartaric stability of the wines, together with the oenological, chromatic and sensory characteristics were studied after the wines had been stored during one year in the bottle. The results indicate that the use of carboxymethyl cellulose and potassium polyaspartate maintained the best the sensory and chromatic characteristics and the wine stability of the wines in comparison with an untreated control wine.

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC) has emerged as a powerful analytical technique for unraveling the volatile composition of complex matrices. This work will present three applications of GCxGC Tof-MS to the oenological field, aimed to identify novel biomarkers to be used in the quality control process of the wine industry. Comprehensive mapping of volatile compounds was conducted in a large sample of 70 sparkling wines, produced by 48 different wineries across 6 vintages and representative of the two main production areas for premium Italian sparkling wines (Franciacorta (FC) and Trentodoc (TN)), using HS-SPME followed by GCxGC-Tof-MS and multivariate analysis. Selection and identification of 196 putative biomarkers allowed clear separation of sparkling wines from FC and TN.