Development and application of CRISPR/Cas in grapevine

In recent years, the ageing bouquet of red Bordeaux wines has been partially unveiled by a chemical and sensory point of view1–3. Minty and fresh notes were found to play a key role in the definition of this complex concept, moreover the freshness dimension in fine aged red wines plays an important role in typicity judgement by wine professionals

In recent years, an undesirable premature “aged” character has been noticed in a growing number of young Riesling wines, associated with extreme weather conditions leading to increased radiation intensity and/ or sun exposure of grapes.

The components and methodology for characterization of the terroir in Spain have been described by Gómez-Miguel et al. (2003), Sotés et al. (2003), taking into account the full range of environmental factors (i.e: climate, vegetation, topography, soils, altitude, etc.),

In the last four years, despite repeated fertilization and irrigation applications from the farmer, a progressive vegetative decline and yield decrease have been observed in a large (5 ha) 10-year-old table grapes vineyard of the cv. Autumn Pearl grafted on 1103 Paulsen and located nearby the Ionian Sea in Taranto province (Apulia, Italy).

Wine lees are the second most important wine by-product in terms of quantity after grape stalk and marc. During aging on lees, it is well known that wine lees yield compounds that act as antioxydant. However the chemical nature of the compounds involved in this behavior (except polyphenols and glutathione) has not yet been totally elucidated. The scarce knowledge of wine lees composition and their potential exploitation make them a promising candidate to obtain new antioxidant products to be used in winemaking. In this study, an eco-sustainable approach to obtain lees extracts exhibiting antioxidant capacity is proposed. Such extracts could be used in a global enological strategy of sulfites level reduction.