Vegetative dose heights ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ and its influence on fruit and wine quality

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.

In grape berry pedicel, xylem hydraulic conductance can be impaired by blockage deposition in the lumen of xylem elements. However, the varietal difference of the interruptions has not yet been characterized. In this preliminary work, we utilized synchrotron x-ray computed microtomography experiments performed at MOGNO beamline (LNLS – Brazil) to identify possible blockage sites in natural grape pedicel xylem. For this, we imaged dehydrated pedicel’s stem portion from the Niagara Rosada variety in three different phenological stages (Pre-veraison (PreV), veraison (V) and post-veraison (PostV). The reconstructed tridimensional images with a voxel size of 1.16 µm were segmented for the identification of xylem vessel lumens. After analysing one pedicel stem per stage, we identified 658 vessels without occlusion throughout his axial plane and 41 in which we could identify possible interruptions.

In the Cognac appellation, the production of white wines is almost exclusively dedicated to elaborate Charentaise eaux-de-vie. In this sense, the quality of Cognac eaux-de-vie intrinsically depends on the quality of the base wines subjected to the distillation stage. In this context, the production of these base wines differs from those of classic white wines to release particular organoleptic properties during the distillation stage.

The utilization of non-Saccharomyces yeasts in the wine industry has increased significantly in recent years. Alternative species need commonly be employed in combination with Saccharomyces cerevisiae to avoid stuck fermentation, or microbial spoilage. The employment of more than one yeast starter can lead to interactions between different species with an impact on the outcome of wine fermentation. Previous studies[1] demonstrated that S. cerevisiae elicits transcriptional responses with both shared and species-specific features in co-culture with other yeast species.

Obiettivo del progetto è la valutazione dell’influenza climatica e pedologica dell’areale di Montefalco sul vitigno Sagrantino, ponendo particolare attenzione alla componente polifenolica e antocianica. Sono stati quindi messi a confronto, a partire dal 2001 fino al 2008, sei differenti zone tutte situate all’interno dell’areale DOCG Sagrantino di Montefalco; per ciascun vigneto alla vendemmia sono state effettuate analisi sui parametri analitici e sul contenuto polifenolico e antocianico delle uve. Ognuna delle sei zone è inoltre stata caratterizzata dal punto di vista pedoclimatico, valutando l’influenza del clima e della tipologia di suolo sui parametri analitici presi in considerazione.