AGEING BOTTLED WINES SUBMERGED IN SEA: DOES IT IMPACT WINE COMPOSITION?

Inorganic phosphonates are known to effectively support the control of grapevine downy mildew in vi- ticulture. Their application helps the plant to induce an earlier and more effective pathogen defense. However, inorganic phosphonates have been banned in organic viticulture due to their classification as plant protection products since October 2013. Despite the ban, phosphonate has been recently detected in organic wines.

Microbial ecosystems are primary drivers of viticultural, oenological and other cellar-related processes
such as wastewater treatment. Metagenomic datasets have broadly mapped the vast microbial species
diversity of many of the relevant ecological niches within the broader wine environment, from vineyard
soils to plants and grapes to fermentation. The data highlight that species identities and diversity
significantly impact agronomic performance of vineyards as well as wine quality, but the complexity
of these systems and of microbial growth dynamics has defeated attempts to offer actionable
tools to guide or predict specific outcomes of ecosystem-based interventions.

This paper focuses on how taste in wine (and other foods) changes and the implications of this process
for producers and merchants.
It draws primarily on the changing taste of and taste for champagne in Britain in the 19th century. Between 1850 and 1880 champagne went from a dosage level of around 20% (20 grams sugar / litre) to 0%. Champagne became the ‘dinner wine of the elite – drunk with roast meat and savoury dishes.
Contemporaries accepted that while most people could distinguish the taste of good champagne from that of bad, very few could distinguish very good from good.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of vineyards with organic practices and the use of copper as the only fun-gicide against downy mildew raises again the question of the effect of copper on varietal thiols in wine, especially 3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol (3SH) and its acetate (3SHA). A few decades ago, several works indicated that the use of copper in the vineyard had a negative effect on the content of varietal thiols in Sauvignon blanc wines [1, 2]. However, these studies only considered the concentration of the reduced form (RSH) of varietal thiols, without quantifying the oxidised ones. For this purpose, we proposed to monitor both reduced and oxidised forms of varietal thiols in wine under copper stress during alcoholic fermentation to have a more complete picture of the biological and chemical mechanisms.

A lot of work has been done on the impact of Botrytis on the foam of sparkling wines. This work often concerns wines produced in cool regions, where Botrytis is the dominant fungal pathogen. However, in southern countries such as Spain, in particularly hot years such as 2022, the majority fungal pathogen is sometimes Rhizopus. Like Botrytis, Rhizopus is a fungus that produces an aspartic protease.