Pacific Northwest wine regions and climates

The aromatic complexity of a wine results from the perception of the association of volatile molecules and each aroma can be categorized into different families. The “green” aromas family in red wines has retained our attention by its close link with the fruity perception. In that study, the “green” olfactory concept of red wines was considered through a strategy combining both sensory analysis and hyphenated chromatographic techniques including HPLC and MDGC (Multidimensional Gas Chromatography). The aromatic space of this concept was specified by lexical generation through a free association task on 22 selected wines by a panel of wine experts. Then, 70 French red wines were scored on the basis of the intensity of their “green” and “fruity” attributes.

Wine viticulture, being firmly linked to the vine-terroir relationship, has always encountered significant bottlenecks to genetic innovation. Nonetheless, the development of new breeding strategies leading to the selection of stress resilient genotypes is urgent, especially in viticulture, where it would allow reducing the use of chemical treatments adopted to control fungal diseases. Genome editing represents an extremely promising breeding technique. Unfortunately, the well-known recalcitrance of several wine grape cultivars to in vitro regeneration strongly limits the exploitation of this approach, which to our knowledge has so far been developed on table grape genotypes with high regeneration potential.

Lugana Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) wines are made from Turbiana grapes. The aroma of Lugana wines results from the combined contribution of esters, terpenes, norisprenoids, sulfur compounds and the benzenoid methyl salicylate. This study aims to investigate how volatile aroma compounds are affected by different nitrogen supplies and yeast strains. Wines were produced with a standard protocol with 2021 Turbiana grapes with two different yeasts Zymaflore Delta e Zymaflore X5 (Laffort, France).During the alcoholic fermentation of the must, when H2S appeared, additions of various nitrogen supply were made: inorganic nitrogen, organic nitrogen, a mix of inorganic and organic nitrogen and organic nitrogen with an addition of pure methionine. During wine fermentation, a daily measurement of hydrogen sulfide was carried out.

In viticulture, a warming climate can have a very significant impact on grapevine development and therefore on the quality and characteristics of wines across different spatial scales, ranging from global to local. In order to adapt wine-growing to climate change, global climate models can be used to define future scenarios, but only at the scale of major wine regions. Despite the huge progress made over the last ten years in terms of the spatial resolution of climate models (now downscaled to a few square kilometres), they are not yet sufficiently precise to account for the local climate variability associated with such parameters as local topography, in spite of these parameters being decisive for vine and wine characteristics. This study describes a method to downscale future climate scenarios to vineyard scale. Networks of data loggers have been used to collect air temperature at canopy level in the Waipara winegrowing region (New Zealand) over five growing seasons. These measurements allow the creation of fine-scale geostatistical models and maps of temperature (at 100 m resolution) for the growing season. In order to model climate change at pilot site scale, these geostatistical models have been combined with regional climate change predictions for the periods 2031-2050 and 2081-2100 based on the RCP8.5 climate change scenario. The integration of local climate variability with regionalized climate change simulations allows assessment of the impacts of climate change at the vineyard scale. The improved knowledge gained using this methodology results from the increased horizontal resolution that better addresses the concerns of winegrowers. The results provide the local winegrowers with information necessary to understand current processes, as well as historical and future viticulture trends at the scale of their site, thereby facilitating decisions about future response strategies.

One of the main plant defence mechanisms is the Systemic Acquired Resistance (SAR) mediated by Salicylic Acid (SA). This is a heightened and broad-spectrum immune response initiated by the exposure to pathogens, inducing resistance not only in the infected site, but also throughout the entire plant. It was demonstrated that plant immune system can be regulated by two classes of SA receptors: NONEXPRESSOR OF PR GENES 1 (NPR1) and NPR1-LIKE PROTEIN 3 and 4 (NPR3/NPR4). While NPR1 is required for SA-induction followed by the expression of pathogenesis-related (PR) protein and resistance against pathogens, NPR3/NPR4 serve as transcriptional co-repressors of SA-responsive genes.