In an attempt to reduce the pH of juice and wine, different fertiliser applications and canopy management practices were evaluated in South Africa in a field trial. Fertiliser treatments entailed no, CaSO4, Ca(OH)2, and MgSO4 fertilisation.

The development and application of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas (CRISPR-associated protein) technologies have revolutionized genome editing in plants due to its simplicity, high efficiency, and versatility. As an economically important fruit crop worldwide, grapevine genome editing using CRISPR/Cas technologies has also been reported these years. Here we introduce the development briefly of the most popular CRISPR/Cas9 system and also the state-of-the-art CRISPR technologies developed so far. Moreover, we summarize CRISPR/Cas9-mediated applications for gene functional study and trait improvement in grapevine.

Root System Architecture (RSA) is crucial for plant resilience and resource uptake, yet remains underexplored in viticulture.

UNESCO World Heritage as the link, Europe as the area covered. VITOUR network is born on this idea, on Loire Valley Mission and InterLoire’s initiative. It gathers vineyards inscribed on UNESCO World Heritage List.

Soils in vineyards are recognized as complex agrosystems whose characteristics reflect complex interactions between natural factors (lithology, climate, slope, biodiversity) and human activities. To date, most of the unknown lies in an incomplete understanding of soil ecosystems, and specifically in the microbial biodiversity even though soil microbiota is involved in many key functions, such as nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. Soil biological properties are indicative of soil quality. Therefore, understanding how soil communities are related to soil ecosystem functioning is becoming an essential issue for soil strategy conservation. Here, we propose to assess the importance of land-cover history on the present-day microbiological and physico-chemical properties. The studied area was selected in the Burgundian vineyards (Pernand-Vergelesses, Burgundy, France) where land occupation has been reconstructed over the last 40 years. Soil samples were collected in five areas reflecting various land cover history (forest, vineyards, shifting from forest to vineyards). For each area, physico-chemical parameters (pH, C, N, P, grain size) were measured and DNA was extracted to characterize the abundance and diversity of microbial communities. The obtained results show significant differences in the five areas suggesting that present-day microbial molecular biomass and bacterial taxonomic is partly inherited from past land occupation. Over longer period of time, such study of land-uses legacies may help to better assess ecosystem recovery and the impact of management practices for a better soil quality and vineyards sustainability.