Impacts of fumaric acid addition at the bottling on Cabernet Sauvignon wine quality. Comparison with tartaric acid addition.

In view of increasing drought frequencies due to climate change, enhancing grapevine resilience to water scarcity has become vital for sustainable viticulture.

Oloroso Sherry is a typical fortified wine from Jerez de la Frontera (south of Spain). It is one of the most used in the seasoning of oak barrels, called Sherry Cask, destined in this area for ageing brandies or condiments as wine vinegars. Brandy de Jerez is an European Geographical Indication for grape-derived spirits. Its special organoleptic characteristics are due to its traditional dynamic ageing in Sherry Casks. American oak is the most common wood employed in Jerez area, where Brandy de Jerez is exclusively manufactured. During ageing period of Sherry and brandies, the wood is not only a container, it is involved in several physicochemical process with the Sherry or the distillate. Oak wood is the responsible of the presence of many compounds in the products, affecting their aroma and chemical composition and having a high influence in their final quality. Moreover, the seasoned wood with Sherry wine could transfer the compounds from wine into the brandy, improving its aroma and flavor.

Commercial red wines use the malolactic fermentation process to ensure stability from a microbiological point of view. In this second fermentation, malic acid is converted into L-lactic acid under controlled steps.

Agriculture, natural resource management and the production and sale of products such as wine are increasingly data-driven activities. Thus, the use of remote and proximal crop and soil sensors to aid management decisions is becoming commonplace and ‘Agtech’ is proliferating commercially; mapping, underpinned by geographical information systems and complex methods of spatial analysis, is widely used. Likewise, the chemical and sensory analysis of wines draws on multivariate statistics; the efficient winery intake of grapes, subsequent production of wines and their delivery to markets relies on logistics; whilst the sales and marketing of wines is increasingly driven by artificial intelligence linked to the recorded purchasing behaviour of consumers. In brief, there is data everywhere!

Opinions will vary on whether these developments are a good thing. Those concerned with the ‘mystique’ of wine, or the historical aspects of terroir and its preservation, may find them confronting. In contrast, they offer an opportunity to those interested in the biophysical elements of terroir, and efforts aimed at better understanding how these impact on vineyard performance and the sensory attributes of resultant wines. At the previous Terroir Congress, we demonstrated the potential of analytical methods used at the within-vineyard scale in the development of Precision Viticulture, in contributing to a quantitative understanding of regional terroir. For this conference, we take this approach forward with examples from contrasting locations in both the northern and southern hemispheres. We show how, by focussing on the vineyards within winegrowing regions, as opposed to all of the land within those regions, we might move towards a more robust terroir zoning than one derived from a mixture of history, thematic mapping, heuristics and the whims of marketers. Aside from providing improved understanding by underpinning terroir with data, such methods should also promote improved management of the entire wine value chain.

With growing consumer interest in products without chemical additives, limiting the use of sulfites is a priority for the wine industry. Bioprotection is a biological alternative that avoids or reduces the risks of alterations that have a negative impact on the organoleptic quality of wines and, ultimately, on their acceptability to consumers. bioprotection can also provide a response to the risks of microbiological deviations, which are increased both by climate change and by the organization of harvesting operations, which increasingly include the use of multi-bins filled at the vine, exposing the harvest to sometimes high temperatures for longer periods of time.