Effects of hormone- and natural-based elicitors at the transcriptomic level in berries of cv. Tempranillo

The last step in winemaking is packaging the wines for market placement, while preserving the quality attained during vinification. Since the 1980s, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) has been recognised as an incidental and random contaminant of cork, with its migration into wine thought to contribute to ‘cork taint’. This molecule is not a cork component and little is known about how it is formed on trees. Its formation from the chlorine used to wash the cork stoppers, long suspected, has been excluded by the abandonment of chlorine washing.

Aim: The aim of this research is to quantify the impacts of different cordon establishment techniques on vine health and longevity. It is hypothesised that wrapping developing cordon arms tightly around the cordon wire will cause a constriction of the vascular system, becoming worse over time and disrupting the flow of water and nutrients.

In greenhouse, emission of volatile organic compounds (VOC) by grapevine leaves has already been reported in response to the defence elicitor sulfated laminarin (PS3) [1]. In order to check that this response was not specific to PS3, experiments were conducted on Vitis cv Marselan plantlets with several other elicitors of different chemical structures: i.e. Bastid® (COS-OGA),

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.

Climate change represents a major challenge for the French wine industry. Climatic conditions in French vineyards have already changed and will continue to evolve. One of the notable effects on grapevine is the advancing growing season. The aim of this study is to characterise the evolution of agroclimatic indicators (Huglin index, number of hot days, mean temperature, cumulative rainfall and number of rainy days during the growing season) at French wine-growing regions scale between 1980 and 2019 using gridded data (8 km resolution, SAFRAN) and for the middle of the 21th century (2046-2065) with 21 GCMs statistically debiased and downscaled at 8 km. A set of three phenological models were used to simulate the budburst (BRIN, Smoothed-Utah), flowering, veraison and theoretical maturity (GFV and GSR) stages for two grape varieties (Chardonnay and Cabernet-Sauvignon) over the whole period studied. All the French wine-growing regions show an increase in both temperatures during the growing season and Huglin index. This increase is accompanied by an advance in the simulated flowering (+3 to +9 days), veraison (+6 to +13 days) and theoretical maturity (+6 to +16 days) stages, which are more noticeable in the north-eastern part of France. The climate projections unanimously show, for all the GCMs considered, a clear increase in the Huglin index (+662 to 771 °C.days compared to the 1980-1999 period) and in the number of hot days (+5.6 to 22.6 days) in all the wine regions studied. Regarding rainfall, the expected evolution remains very uncertain due to the heterogeneity of the climates simulated by the 21 models. Only 4 regions out of 21 have a significant decrease in the number of rainy days during the growing season. The two budburst models show a strong divergence in the evolution of this stage with an average difference of 18 days between the two models on all grapevine regions. The theoretical maturity is the most impacted stage with a potential advance between 40 and 23 days according to wine-growing regions.