The adaptation and resilience of scions and rootstocks to water constraint

Oxidative stability is a critical factor in maintaining wine quality during its shelf-life. SO₂ is commonly added to wine due to its strong antioxidant activity, although there is a general push to reduce SO₂ use in vinification.

Root architecture (RSA), the spatial-temporal arrangement of a root system in soil, is essential for edaphic resources acquisition by the plant, and thus contributes largely to its productivity and adaptation to environmental stresses, particularly soil water deficit. In grafted grapevine, while the degree of drought tolerance induced by the rootstock has been well documented in the vineyard, information about the underlying physiological processes, particularly at the root level, is scarce, due to the inherent difficulties in observing large root systems in situ. The aims of this study were (i) to determine the phenotypic differences in traits related to root distribution and morphology along the substrate profile in different Vitis rootstocks during early growth, (ii) to assess the plasticity of these traits to soil water deficit and (iii) to quantify their relationships with plant water uptake.

The grape and wine industries have long sought rapid, reliable and cost-effective methods to screen and monitor all the stages of the winemaking process, which include grape ripening in the vineyard, harvest and grape reception at the weighbridge, the fermentation stage and the bottling of the final product.

A critical aspect of wine quality is the overall expression of wine flavour, which is formed by the interplay of volatile aroma compounds, their precursors, and taste and matrix components.
Grapes directly contribute to wine only a small number of potent aroma compounds, and the unique
sensory attributes and perceived quality of a wine result from combining 100s of metabolites of grapes, yeast and bacteria, and oak wood.

Stable isotopes of carbon (δ¹³C) and nitrogen (δ¹⁵N) provide valuable integrative indicators of grapevine water status (Gaudillère et al., 2002; van Leeuwen et al., 2023) and nitrogen metabolism (Santesteban et al., 2015, (Santesteban et al., 2024).