The adaptation and resilience of scions and rootstocks to water constraint

Water scarcity, high air temperatures, high vapor pressure deficit, and increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, namely heat waves, exert huge pressure on viticulture, as is the case of Mediterranean climates. Therefore, farmers rely more and more on irrigation to overcome these constraints. Deficit irrigation is a proved strategy to optimize irrigation efficiency and wine quality. The present study intends to demonstrate the application of precision techniques, namely remote sensing derived vegetation indices (VI) and an open source software, SIMDualKc, to compute crop evapotranspiration using the dual crop coefficient approach (Kcb + Ke), for deficit irrigation management.

Bud death due to cold damage is a recurrent and major economic issue with Vitis vinifera L. in the Northeastern U.S. winegrowing regions. Primary buds – and sometimes secondary and tertiary buds – are often damaged by fluctuating temperatures in the winter and early spring. To maintain balanced vegetative and reproductive growth of a vine, pruning practices need to be adjusted to account for bud damage. Conventional bud damage assessment requires growers to sample canes/spurs, cut nodes with a razor blade, and then visually assess bud damage. This process is laborious and becomes a major barrier for damage-compensated pruning decision-making, leading to too few live buds per vine and the associated excessive vigor and low yield that result. The overarching goal of this study was to develop an active thermographic system for non-destructive detection of bud damage in the vineyard.

Microsatellite markers are a valuable tool to facilitate the management of germplasm collections and assess genetic diversity. This study reports the genetic characterization of a large collection of 379 rootstocks and other non-viniferaaccessions maintained at the University of Milan, Italy.

Residual grape solids (suspended particles) in white and rosé musts vary depending on the clarification pro-cess. These suspended solids contain lipids (more especially phytosterols) that are essential for yeast meta-bolism and viability during fermentation in anaerobic conditions.

In this work “ethanol as an internal standard” method was used for the SPME GC-MS quantification of volatile congeners in wines. Our aim was to develop a fast and simple method of wine analysis without additional procedures, reagents etc. A row of standard solutions containing some frequently found congeners in wine was prepared gravimetrically. Suggested method was compared with traditional internal standard method.