Which potential for Near Infrared Spectroscopy to characterize rootstock effects on grapevines?

During wine alcoholic fermentation, yeasts produce volatile aroma compounds from sugar and nitrogen metabolism. Some of the metabolic pathways leading to these compounds have been known for more than a century.

Soil management through cover crops can influence the cycle of nutrients, promote water infiltration, decrease erosion, and enhance the soil microbiota biodiversity, improving the grapevine performance. However, the area under the vines tends to be left bare by applying herbicides or tillage to avoid competition with the crop in semi-arid climates. Use of covers under-vine might be an alternative to these practices aiming at grapevine quality and soil health improvement. The aim of this research was to study the implications of soil management under the vines (cultivation and cover crops) on growth, yield, berry composition and soil microbial communities. A cover crop composed by a mixture of legumes was sown and compared with a control (cultivation), which includes frequent tillage to keep the soil bare, in three areas characterized by different edaphoclimatic conditions in the region of Navarra.

The above-ground parts of plants, which constitute the phyllosphere, have long been considered devoid of bacteria and fungi, at least in their internal tissues and microbial presence there was long considered a sign of disease. However, recent studies have shown that plants harbour complex bacterial communities, the so-called “microbiome”[1]. We are only beginning to unravel the origin of these bacterial plant inhabitants, their community structure and their roles, which in analogy to the gut microbiome, are likely to be of essential nature. Among their multifaceted metabolic possibilities, bacteria have been recently demonstrated to emit a wide range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can greatly impact the growth and development of both the plant and its disease-causing agents.

Aims: Decreasing longevity of vineyards due to the increase in the infection of different grapevine trunk diseases is a growing concern, and could be related to the quality of grafting. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the use of xylem hydraulic conductivity measurements as a potential indicator for the quality of vascular connections in

the aim of this study was the optimization and validation of a robust and comprehensive method for the determination of volatile carbonyl compounds (VCCs) in wines