Molecular characterization of a variegated grapevine mutant cv Bruce’s Sport

Initiatives have been ongoing in recent years to safeguard biodiversity in the oenological sector via a process of enhancement of ancient varieties, under a pressure of a market strongly oriented towards production deriving from native vines of specific geographical zones. In that sense, Aosta Valley
(Italy) has raised the need to preserve and characterize its minority vine varieties which have the potentiality to give varietal wines. Fumin represents the 7% of the production of the region with 16 hectares of vineyards and 753 hectolitres of derived wine. Due to its large phenolic potential, strong astringency and deep colour, it has long been, and is still today, assembled or blended with other varieties as occurs, for example, for the Torrette.

In recent years, a pool of terpenoids possibly implicated in minty odours and in the appreciable refreshing sensation, has been identified in long aged red Bordeaux wines (Lisanti et al., 2021, Picard et al., 2016; Picard et al., 2017). These compounds were found to play a key role in the so-called “ageing bouquet”, that can be defined as “the homogeneous, harmonious flavour resulting from the complex transformation process in wine during bottle storage” (Picard et al., 2015). Moreover the minty-fresh sensory dimension in fine aged red wines plays an important role in typicity judgement by wine professionals (Picard et al., 2015).

AIM: This study aimed to use simultaneous measurements of absorbance, transmittance, and fluorescence excitation-emission matrix (A-TEEM) combined with chemometrics as a rapid method to authenticate wines from three vintages within a single geographical indication (GI) according to their subregional variations

In the actual scenario of climate change, optimization of water usage is becoming critical in sustainable viticulture. Most of the current approaches to assess grapevine water status and drive irrigation scheduling are either destructive, time and labour consuming and monitor a small, limited number of plants. This work presents a novel methodology using a contactless, miniaturized, low-cost NIR spectrometer to monitor the vineyard water status variability from a moving vehicle, to provide reliable information towards precision irrigation.

AIM: Wine consumption in the last fifteen years showed a decrease in Europe [1]. New alternatives of wines appeared on the market. Those beverages are obtained by blending wines and fruit juices or flavoring wines with artificial or natural aromas and have medium alcohol content (from 8 to 10.5%) [2]. Recently, an innovative fruit wine has been proposed obtained by co-fermenting grape must and kiwi juice [3] whose potential attractiveness to consumers should be exploited. However, differences in product acceptability and perception, as well as the individuals’ willingness to consume and pay could change in function of subjects socio-demographic characteristics. The target group selected is represented by young adults (18-35 years old) consumption groups.