Extreme canopy management for vineyard adaptation to climate change: is it a good idea?

Context and Purpose. Management of plant-parasitic nematodes in perennial cropping systems such as wines grapes is challenging.

The agro-ecological transition in winegrowing can benefit from the environmental assessment of practices to inform producers’ technical choices. life cycle assessment (lca) evaluates the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle. this paper takes a look at the tools available for the detailed assessment and eco-design of winegrowing practices, their uses and developments in the vitarbae research project (2023-2026). this project aims to establish and equip support and training courses for the agroecological transition in viticulture and fruit arboriculture.

A multi-element pedo-geochemical survey was carried out in Vrbničko polje vineyards on the Krk Island, Croatia. This Mediterranean winegrowing site is famous by Žlahtina wine production.

High concentration of sugars in grapes and alcohols in wines is one of the consequences of climate change on viticulture production in several wine regions. One of the options to alleviate this potential problem is to perform severe shoot trimming of the vines to limit the production of carbohydrates. Two different studies were performed in order to investigate the effects of severe shoot trimming on the composition of Merlot grapes; in a first study severe shoot trimming was performed at three different phenological stages (at berry set, at the beginning of veraison and at the end of veraison), while in a second study two trimming treatments (standard shoot trimming and severe shoot trimming performed at the end of veraison) were combined with two shoot densities in order to evaluate the relative impact of these treatments on Merlot grape composition.

Grapevine yield and fruit quality are two major drivers of input allocation and, ultimately, revenue for grape producers. Because yield and fruit quality vary substantially from year-to-year and within a single block, opportunities exist for optimization via precision management activities that could lead to more profitable and sustainable grape production. Here, we review recent advances in the techniques and technology used to measure, estimate, and forecast grapevine yield and fruit quality. First, we discuss direct “measurement” of yield and quality (i.e. ground-truth data generation), with an emphasis on potential for scalability and automation. Second, we discuss technology and techniques that do not directly measure yield and quality, but use correlated measurements for their estimation.