Biochemical characterization of grape skin cell wall during ripening in relation to Botrytis cinerea susceptibility of two Champagne cultivars

Growing concerns over the environmental and health risks posed by chemical pesticides have highlighted the need to reduce their use in the agri-food sector.

Increasingly warm and dry climate conditions are challenging the viticulture and winemaking sector. Digital technologies and crop modelling bear the promise to provide practical answers to those challenges. As viticultural activities strongly depend on harvest date, its early prediction is particularly important, since the success of winemaking practices largely depends upon this key event, which should be based on an accurate and advanced plan of the annual cycle. Herein, we demonstrate the creation of modelling tools to assess grape ripeness, through sugar concentration monitoring. The study area, the Portuguese Côa valley wine region, represents an important terroir in the “Douro Superior” subregion. Two varieties (cv. Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca) grown in five locations across the Côa Region were considered. Sugar accumulation in grapes, with concentrations between 170 and 230 g l-1, was used from 2014 to 2020 as an indicator of technological maturity conditioned by meteorological factors. The climatic time series were retrieved from the EU Copernicus Service, while sugar data were collected by a non-profit organization, ADVID, and by Sogrape, a leading wine company. The software for calibrating and validating this model framework was the Phenology Modeling Platform (PMP), version 5.5, using Sigmoid and growing degree-day (GDD) models for predictions. The performance was assessed through two metrics: Roots Mean Square Error (RMSE) and efficiency coefficient (EFF), while validation was undertaken using leave-one-out cross-validation. Our findings demonstrate that sugar content is mainly dependent on temperature and air humidity. The models achieved a performance of 0.65

The aim of this communication is the study of the Ronda and Arriate municipal territories environment in order to define and to establish the main physical factors in relation to vine-growing land use. The vine-growing zoning proposed is based on geopedological and climatic features.

Vineyard water management in Australia is often associated with irrigation in warm and hot climates, but in cooler regions the larger share of the seasonal water demand is met by rainfall.

Tannins are very important for grape and wine quality, since they participate in several organoleptic wine characteristics such as astringency perception, bitterness, and the colour stability. The compositions in tannins in grapes and wines differs between seeds and skins. Tannin seeds contain a higher concentration of tannins than skin and has been associated with a coarse and more tannic notes in wines, by contrast, tannin skin are related to a greater softness in the wines.