Identifying physiological and genetic bases of grapevine adaptation to climate change with maintained quality: Genome diversity as a driver for phenotypic plasticity  (‘PlastiVigne’ project)

Aims: Some of the most direct effects of climate variability on grapevines are the changes in the onset and timing of phenological events and in the length of the growing season, which may affect grape quality. The aim of this research was to analyze the projected changes in vine phenology and on grape composition of the Tempranillo variety in Rioja DOCa under different climate change scenarios.

In field conditions, grapevine roots are colonized by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Little is known about the species composition of AMF communities associated to grapevine.

Aim: Terroir is a French concept relating the qualities and quality of agricultural products to their physical and socio-cultural place of origin. It is increasingly used by business and policymakers as a marketing technique to provide economic benefits (e.g. Lenglet, 2014; Wine Australia, 2015), and to potentially preserve cultural heritage (e.g. Bauer, 2009) and the environment (e.g. Bowen, 2010)

The reflections presented here are a synthesis of a set of research on the construction of a scientific logic concerning the relations between the terroir, the vine, the wine, and on the study of a product, the wine, considered as the resulting from many interactions between factors of various orders. This work has benefited greatly from discussions of an epistemological as well as a technical nature with all the researchers at URVV (Angers) and with our colleagues at the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine, over several years.

Many farming operations aim at controlling the leaf area of the vine according to its load. There are several techniques, direct and indirect, of estimate of this leaf area in a specific way, but impossible to implement at great scales. These last years, research in airborne and satellite remote sensing made it possible to show that a multispectral index of vegetation, computed from measurements of reflectances (red and near infrared), the « Normalised Difference Vegetation Index » (NDVI), is well correlated to the « Leaf Area Index » (leaf area per unit of ground) of the vine. Nevertheless these methods of acquisition and processing data are rather constraining and complex.