Predictive Breeding for Wine Quality: From Sensory Traits to Grapevine Genome

Les paysages participent à l’identité des vins de l’Hérault, avec une grande richesse de diversité. Leur observation, au travers des quatre saisons, s’appuie sur deux dimensions primordiales : la genèse de leur construction par l’homme et l’esthétique. L’hiver est la saison la plus favorable au décryptage de ce vignoble étagé, du littoral méditerranéen aux premières pentes du Massif Central; il permet de lire l’histoire des stratégies viticoles des vignerons. Les autres saisons sensibilisent plus à la beauté de vignobles dans des écrins de végétation typiquement méditerranéenne. La multiplicité des pratiques culturales et des cépages contribue à cet attrait. L’incitation au parcours, en toute saison, est très forte grâce au réseau des routes et des chemins de vigne.

Chemical studies aiming at assessing how a wine reacts towards oxidation usually focus on the characterization of wine constituents, such as polyphenols, or oxidation products. As an alternative, the key oxidation intermediate hydrogen peroxide H2O2 has never been quantified, although it plays a pivotal role in wine oxidation. H2O2 is obtained from molecular oxygen as the result of a first cascade of oxidation reactions involving metal ions and polyphenols. The produced H2O2 then reacts in a second cascade of oxidation to produce reactive hydroxyl radicals that can attack almost any chemical substrate in wine.

The relationship between grape production and leaf surface is a highly debated aspect in terms of the impact it may have on the composition and quality of grapes, especially in areas that focus their cultivation on high-quality wine. In many occasions, the limitation of the unitary production level in these areas is claimed to be the main factor for achieving high quality levels in the wine, forgetting the importance of the source-sink relationship and other environmental factors and management of the canopy. Taking this consideration into account, this work seeks to know the response of the vine as a whole, and the individual shoot as well, to the application of various alternatives of leaves and clusters removal, carried out in the phase immediately before veraison, in cv. Verdejo, in Spain.

Approaching the notion of terroir wines at the level of consumption poses a problem due to the absence of a regulatory definition of the term terroir, which is not taken up either at Community level or at national level (the Consumer Code in particular does not define not the land). However, whatever definition is adopted for the terroir, we can retain at the consumer level an identification of the terroir through the different geographical mentions appearing on the labels or on the shelves of the wine shelf.

Vitis vinifera is one of the most diffused grapevines over the word and it is the raw material for high quality wines production. The availability of more resistant interspecific hybrid vine varieties, developed from crosses between Vitis vinifera and other Vitis species, has generating much interest, also due to the low environmental effect of production. However, hybrid grape wine composition and varietal differences between interspecific hybrids are not well defined. Different studies revealed that wine consumption has health effects due to its high content of antioxidants, as phenolic compounds. In particular, simple phenols are appreciated not only for their physiological health benefits, including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and cardioprotective effects, but also because they affect wines organoleptic profile and have a significant role in defining their nutritional characteristics.