The modification of cultural practices in grapevine cv. Syrah, does it modify the characteristics of the musts?

Rotundone, the pepper aroma compound, has been detected in wines made from a large number of grape varieties. However, given the fact that analyzed wines were sourced from different winegrowing regions and seasons, made using different winemaking techniques and at different scales, it remains difficult to assess the real variety potential to produce rotundone.

Worldwide, with an average of 6.7 million cultivated hectares, of which exclusively 51% in Europe (faostat, 2021), the production of table and wine grapes is a leading sector, with continued growth in Europe in the area devoted to vine cultivation. during the growing season, most of the plant organs can be susceptible to several fungal and oomycete diseases, leading to important economic losses and causing detrimental effects on fruit quality. the increasingly scarce availability of fungicidal products, often also related to their relative impact on the environment, coupled with the emergence of resistance in the pathogen to these products, make defence increasingly challenging.

Grapevine is one of the most-frequently phytosanitary treated crop systems. Consequently, restrictions have been applied by the European Commission on the number of pesticide treatments and the maximum quantity of copper fungicides allowed per year. Moreover, there is a need and an increasing demand for more ecological-sustainable agricultural products.
Seaweeds are currently used as fertilizers in viticulture, as they have been proven to be beneficial in several ways related to growth and nutrition.

Traditionally, non-saccharomyces yeasts were deemed undesirable in winemaking, for this reason, it is a common practice to add sulphites to prevent their proliferation during the initial stages of vinification. However, the current research on yeast diversity has unveiled numerous non-saccharomyces strains possessing advantageous traits that enrich the sensory profile of wines. The genus hanseniaspora is often associated with wine fermentation and is also commonly found on grapes.

Newer sequencing technologies have allowed for the addition of microbes to the story of terroir. The same environmental factors that influence the phenotypic expression of a crop also shape the composition of the microbial communities found on that crop. For fermented goods, such as wine, that microbial community ultimately influences the organoleptic properties of the final product that is delivered to customers. Recent studies have begun to study the biogeography of wine-associated microbes within different growing regions, finding that communities are distinct across landscapes. Despite this new knowledge, there are still many questions about what factors drive these differences. Our goal was to quantify differences in yeast communities due to management style between seven pairs of conventional and biodynamic vineyards (14 in total) throughout Oregon, USA. We wanted to answer the following questions: 1) are yeast communities distinct between biodynamic vineyards and conventional vineyards? 2) are these differences consistent across a large geographic region? 3) can differences in yeast communities be tied to differences in metabolite profiles of the bottled wine? To collect our data we took soil, bark, leaf, and grape samples from within each vineyard from five different vines of pinot noir. We also collected must and a 10º brix sample from each winery. Using these samples, we performed 18S amplicon sequencing to identify the yeast present. We then used metabolomics to characterize the organoleptic compounds present in the bottled wine from the blocks the year that we sampled. We are actively in the process of analysing our data from this study.