WINE SWIRLING: A FIRST STEP TOWARDS THE UNLOCKING OF THE WINE’STASTER GESTURE

The evolution of wine during bottle ageing has been of great interest to ensure consistent quality over time. While the role of wine closures on the amount of oxygen is well-known [1], closures could also play other roles such as the scalping phenomenon of flavour compounds. Flavour scalping has been described as the sorption of flavour compounds by the packaging material, which could result in losses of flavour intensity. It has been reported in the literature that volatile sulphur compounds (VSC) can be scalped on wine closures depending on the type of closure (traditional and agglomerated cork, screw-cap, synthetic [2]).

In recent years, consumer demand for products without chemical additives increased, becoming a priority for the wine sector. SO₂ is widely used for its multiple properties including antiseptics, antioxidants and antioxidasics and the strategy of bioprotection in winemaking represents now an alternative to this chemical additive. In oenology, results have highlighted the interest of bioprotection to limit the development of microorganisms like Hanseniaspora uvarum and thus reduce the doses of sulphite. Indeed, this species is considered because of its acetic acid and methyl butyl acetate production, the latter can cover the varietal character of wines.

Climate change leads to even more hostile and stressful for the wine microorganism conditions and consequently issues with fermentation rate progression and off-character formation are frequently observed. The objective of the current research was to classify a great collection of yeast isolates from Greek wines based on their technological properties with oenological interest. Towards this direction, fourteen spontaneously fermented wines from different regions of Greece were collected for further yeast typing. The yeast isolates were subjected in molecular analyses and identification at species level.

In the challenge of transforming waste into useful products that can be re-used in a circular economy perspective, winery by-products can be considered as a source of potentially bioactive molecules such as polyphenols. The wine industry generates each year 20 million tons of by-products. Kombucha fermentation is an ancestral process which allow to increase the biological properties of tea by the action of a microbial consortium formed by yeasts and bacteria called SCOBY. It belongs to the field of healthy food for which the interest of consumers is growing. The objective of this work was to propose a new functional beverage made from winemaking by-products fermented by a Kombucha SCOBY.

Wine flavanols are extracted from grape skin and seeds along red winemaking. Potentially, eight flavan-3-ol subunits may be present as monomers or as tannins constituents, being these catechin, epicathechin, gallocatechin, epigallocatechin end the gallates of the mentioned units. In this work the flavanol profiles of grape skins and seeds before (grapes) and after (pomace) red winemaking were studied together with the one in the corresponding wines. The trials were made over two vintages in Vitis vinifera cv. Tannat, Syrah and Marselan from Uruguay.