The use of rootstock as a lever in the face of climate change and dieback of vineyard

Aim: Downy mildew is a crucial disease in viticulture. In-field evaluation of downy mildew has been classically based on visual inspection of leaves and fruit. Nevertheless, non-invasive sensing technologies could be used for disease detection in grapevine. The aim of this study was to assess downy mildew severity in grapevine leaves using machine vision.

In the course of the present work, which is the first part of a study on the “characterization of Barbera dell’Oltrepo Pavese D.O.C.” 30 wines Barbera from 1993 vintage have been compared only regarding their sensory characteristics. An unstructured scale card, composed by 15 descriptors have been used.

Bud death due to cold damage is a recurrent and major economic issue with Vitis vinifera L. in the Northeastern U.S. winegrowing regions. Primary buds – and sometimes secondary and tertiary buds – are often damaged by fluctuating temperatures in the winter and early spring. To maintain balanced vegetative and reproductive growth of a vine, pruning practices need to be adjusted to account for bud damage. Conventional bud damage assessment requires growers to sample canes/spurs, cut nodes with a razor blade, and then visually assess bud damage. This process is laborious and becomes a major barrier for damage-compensated pruning decision-making, leading to too few live buds per vine and the associated excessive vigor and low yield that result. The overarching goal of this study was to develop an active thermographic system for non-destructive detection of bud damage in the vineyard.

The plant surface typically comprises of various epidermal cell types which synthesise and deposit a protective waxy layer known as the cuticle. The cuticle is a significant contributor to important crop traits related to drought tolerance, biotic stress, postharvest fruit quality as well as providing structural support. In this work we have investigated grape berry cuticle formation in the context of the accumulation of anti-fungal specialised metabolites and the ability of the cuticle to structurally cope with the rapid expansion of ripening berries. Metabolic QTL analysis was performed in a grapevine cross population, using chemical profiling data collected via GC-MS analysis for cuticular waxes.

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.