The leaf area is of fundamental importance so that the plant can realize adequate levels of photosynthesis for the accumulation of reserves and to reach a suitable maturation of
the berries. In this sense, the objective was to evaluate the effect of different lengths of the stalks from the first support wire, in the must and in the wine of ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’.

During a three-year study the vineyards of the wine-growing region Carnuntum have been investigated for their terroir characteristics (climate, soil, rocks) and major viticulture functions. As an outcome of the study, various thematic layers and geodata analyses describe the geo-environmental properties and variability of the wine growing region and delimit homogenous multilayer mapping units by using a Geographic Information System.

Grape composition is of high interest for producing quality wines. For that, grape analyses are necessary, and they still require sample preparation, whether with classical analyses or with NIR analyses.

Developments in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies allow us to obtain large amounts of microbial information from wine and must samples. Thus approaches, that are aimed at characterising the microbial diversity during fermentation, can be enhanced, or possibly even replaced, with HTS-based metabarcoding. To reduce experimental biases and increase data reproducibility, we compared 3 DNA extraction methods by evaluating differences in the fungal diversity with Riesling alcoholic fermentation samples at four different vineyards. The fungal diversity profiling was done using the genetic markers ITS2 and D2 using metabarcoding. The extraction methods compared consisted of a commercial kit, a recently published protocol that includes a DNA enhancer, and a protocol based on a buffer containing common inhibitor removal reagents. All methods were able to distinguish vineyard effects on the fungal diversity, but the results differed quantitatively.

Viticulture and winemaking represent a key sector for the Portuguese economy. As grapevines are strongly governed by atmospheric factors, climate change may impose a major threat to this crop. In this study, the current-past (1950-2000) and future (2041-2070) climatic conditions in Portugal are analyzed using a number of bioclimatic indices, including a new categorized index (CatI).