Influence of viticulture on the temporary evolution of the landscape: the case of the AO Ribera del Duero (Central Spain)

Wine is a complex matrix whose composition depends on climatic, agricultural, and winemaking factors, making quality control and authenticity assessment critical in the global market.

With the aim of producing premium wines, it is admitted that moderate environmental stresses may contribute to the accumulation of compounds of interest in grapes. However the ongoing climate change, with the appearance of more limiting conditions of production is a major concern for the wine industry economic. Will it be possible to maintain the vineyards in place, to preserve the current grape varieties and how should we anticipate the adaptation measures to ensure the sustainability of vineyards? In this context, the question of the responses and adaptation of grapevine to abiotic stresses becomes a major scientific issue to tackle. An abiotic stress can be defined as the effect of a specific factor of the physico-chemical environment of the plants (temperature, availability of water and minerals, light, etc.) which reduces growth, and for a crop such as the vine, the yield, the composition of the fruits and the sustainability of the plants. Water stress is in many minds, but a systemic vision is essential for at least two reasons. The first reason is that in natural environments, a single factor is rarely limiting, and plants have to deal with a combination of constraints, as for example heat and drought, both in time and at a given time. The second reason is that plants, including grapevine, have central mechanisms of stress responses, as redox regulatory pathways, that play an important role in adaptation and survival. Here we will review the most recent studies dealing with this issue to provide a better understanding of the grapevine responses to a combination of environmental constraints and of the underlying regulatory pathways, which may be very helpful to design more adapted solutions to cope with climate change.

The grape maturation process is being affected by the consequences of global climate change and, as a result, there is a gap at harvest time between the technological maturity of grapes (mostly the concentration of sugar and acids) and its phenolic quality. Due to this gap, the wines elaborated using those grapes show a non-adequate phenolic composition, which results in defects on its color and astringency characteristics. Astringency is mainly related to the salivary protein precipitation because of the interaction not only with wine flavanols but also with other wine phenolics, such as flavonols or different pigments.

L’étude du comportement physiologique et agronomique de la vigne (cv. Chasselas) a été réalisée en 2001 par la Station fédérale de recherches en production végétale de Changins sur divers terroirs viticoles vaudois (Suisse), dans le cadre d’un projet d’étude des terroirs viticoles vaudois en collaboration avec le bureau I LETESSIER (SIGALES) à Grenoble et l’École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Retrotransposons, particularly of the Ty-Copia and Ty-Gypsy superfamilies, represent the most abundant and widespread transposons in many plant genomes. Grapevine is no exception and it is clear that these mobile elements have played a major role in the evolution of Vitaceae genomes. While speculation abounds around the possible role of transposons in plant genomes, outside of the rather obvious involvement of retrotransposition in fueling genome expansion, there is little clarity of the actual role these elements have in both developing new genetic variation and in modulating epigenetic responses within genomes to changing climate. To this end we have been exploring de-novo assembled Sauvignon blanc and Pinot noir genomes with a view to catalogue retrotransposon loci to determine the structural intactness and thus age of insertion variation across a small number of clonal linages of these 2 varietals in an attempt to identify ‘live’ TE loci.