Hormonal and associated metabolic changes in susceptible harvest-ripe grapes under asymptomatic and symptomatic Esca disease

Intensification is considered one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss in farmland. The more intensive management practices that have been adopted the last decades, contributed to species declines from all taxonomic groups. Moreover, agricultural intensification has led to an important change of land use. Complex, mixed agro-ecosystems with cultivated and non-cultivated habitats have been converted to simplified, intensive and homogeneous ones with severe effects on biodiversity.

Grapes development is determined by grape cultivar and vineyard climatic conditions and consequently affecting the phenolic and aroma on grapes and wines. Abscisic Acid (ABA) plays a key role in the promotion of fruit ripening and fruit anthocyanin content. Herein, we report the impact of ABA to grape ripening and wine quality.

Inactive dry yeast treatments in the vineyard are a tool used with the aim to improve the concentration and quality of secondary metabolites in grapes, leading to a better differentiation of the wines made from grapes differently treated. In this work, a foliar spraying treatment with yeast derivatives specifically designed to be used with the patent pending application technology of Lallemand Inc. Canada (LalVigne® Mature, Lallemand Inc., Montreal, Canada) was tested on Vitis vinifera L. cv. Barbera and Nebbiolo black winegrapes. The aim was to evaluate the effect of this treatment on the phenolic compounds accumulation, the skin physical-mechanical properties and the related phenolic extractability. Prior to analysis, the berries were sorted by flotation in order to evaluate their distribution by density class, and to determine the skin texture parameters of berries with different sugar contents, thus understanding also the ripening effect.

This work aimed at investigating red wine olfactory–oral cross-modal interactions, and at testing their impact on the correlations between sensory and chemical variables. Seventy-four Italian red whole wines (WWs) from 10 varieties, and corresponding deodorized wines (DWs), were evaluated by sensory descriptive assessment.

Global climate change is exerting an influence on vine phenology, leading to a decoupling of technological and phenolic maturity of grapes. This results in the modification of berry chemical composition, which can translate into wines with excessive astringency. The addition of mannoproteins (MP) to wine has been proposed as a way of mitigating this problem, since some studies have shown that MPs can modulate wine astringency. However, the mechanism underlying the astringency modulation effect of MPs is not well known and it seems to be dependent on the compositional and structural characteristics of the MP.