Veraison as determinant for wine quality and its potential for climate adapted breeding

Climate change and the growing need to reduce the use of phytosanitary products demand the exploration of disease-resistant grape varieties and/or adapted to drought conditions.

A crucial issue associated with the long-term impact of climate change in viticulture concerns the capacity of resilience of the typical varieties currently cultivated in traditional areas. Indeed, regions that are currently characterized by optimal climatic conditions can cease to be so in the future. At the same time, new premium wine production regions may arise north of 50oN. Both these threats and opportunities are based on the assessment of a very likely gradual temperature increase along the 21st century, resulting from the ensemble mean of the state-of-the-art climate projections. Such an assessment is orienting decision-makers and stakeholders to rethink the grapevine cultivation zoning, prefiguring, for each variety, a shift at higher latitudes and/or at higher altitudes areas.

The recent effects on temperature and rainfall caused by global warming pose a serious threat to the wine industry worldwide, mainly in terms of a loss of quality in the wines produced.

A new framework for the segmentation and characterization of row crops on remote sensing images has been developed and validated for vineyard monitoring. This framework operates on any high-resolution remote sensing images since it is mainly based on geometric information. It aims at obtaining maps describing the variation of a vegetation index such as NDVI along each row of a parcel.

Little research has been undertaken to investigate the main contributors to the aroma of Syrah wines from the cool northern part of the Rhone valley despite the historical importance of this cultivar for this wine region. The aim of the present work was to study the key odorants of Crozes-Hermitage wines made