Cover crops under-vine impact on grapevine performance and vineyard soil microorganisms is highly affected by edaphoclimatic conditions at a regional scale 

Like France, Hungary has many oak forests used for making barrels since many years. But if the differences between the woods of the North, the East and the South-West forests of France are well known, this is probably not the case of Hungarian forests. However taking into account the essential differences of climates and soils, differences must be significant and the general name “Hungarian oak” must not have any real meaning. We have studied precisely (determination of concentrations of volatile and non-volatile wood compounds, anatomical criteria, measurement of antioxidant capacity) of oaks collected from northeastern Hungary and others collected from the Danube valley in the northwest of the country.

Chitosan is a natural polymeric saccharide admitted by EU since 2011 for must and wine clarification, the reduction of some contaminants (e.g. ochratoxin A) and to prevent the development of wine microbialspoilage due to lactic acid bacteria or Dekkera/Brettanomyces yeasts.

The production of red sparkling wines is lower in Spain in comparison with the winemaking of white or rosé sparkling wines. In red sparkling wine processing it is essential to obtain suitable base wines that should have moderate alcohol content, high acidity, good color values, an adequate mouth-feel and a sweet tannin. Grapes for sparkling wine production have to be harvested at low maturity stages, with lower alcohol contents and higher acidities, which will that the phenolic maturity of the grapes is also low, showing green tannins. This paper analyses different treatments in order to minimize these inconveniences: cold maceration-prefermentation and delestage to elaborate the grapes with lower maturity, must nanofiltration, and the partial osmosis of the wines made from grapes with an adequate maturity degree.

The marked climate change impact on vine and grape development (phenology, sugar content, acidity …) is one of the manifestations of Genotype X Environment X Management interactions importance in viticulture. Some practices, such as irrigation, can mitigate the effect of water deficit on grape development, but warming is much more difficult to challenge. High temperatures tend to alter the acid balance of the fruit with a parallel increase in sugar concentration. In the long term, genetic improvement to select varieties better coping with temperature elevation appear as a good option to support sustainable viticulture. Nevertheless, the existing phenotypic diversity for grape quality components that are influenced by temperature is poorly understood, which jeopardizes breeding strategies.

The present work contributes by developing a rapid sensory-directed methodology for the screening and selection of high quality wines with different sensory profiles Therefore, Verdejo and Tempranillo musts were fermented with 50 different yeasts each under controlled laboratory conditions. Resulting samples were firstly categorized according to five levels of quality by a panel of wine professionals (Sáenz-Navajas, Ballester et al. 2013). Higher quality samples were described by flash profiling by a semi-trained panel
(Valentin, Chollet et al. 2012) and most distinctive samples were screened by gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O) (López, Aznar et al. 2002).