Understanding and managing wine production from different terroirs

Aim: To identify the sensory attributes responsible for the typicity of Cabernet Sauvignon wines from three Australian Geographical Indications (GIs) and to explore consumer purchase behaviour and preference with regard to regional wines.

Recent warming trends in climatic patterns are now evident from observational studies. Nowadays, investigating the possible impacts of climate change on biological systems has a great importance in several fields of science.

Vine water status was measured on 96 plots of three vines inside a vineyard block of 0.28 ha during three years: 2003, 2004 and 2005. Three physiological indicators were implemented: stem water potential, carbon isotope discrimination measured on grape sugars at ripeness (δ13C) and canopy temperature measured by high resolution remote sensing. For stem water potential, measurements were taken on every single vine of each plot.

Flow cytometry (FCM) is a powerful technique allowing the detection, characterization and quantification of microbial populations in different fields of application (medical environment, food industry, enology, etc.). Depending on the fluorescent markers and specific probes used, FCM provides information on the physiological state of the cell and allows the quantification of a microorganism of interest within a mixed population. For 15 years, the enological sector has shown growing interest in this technique, which is now used to determine the populations present (of interest or spoilage) and the physiological state of microorganisms at the different stages of winemaking.

“The Human being has an excellent ability to detect and discriminate odors but typically has great difficulty in identifying specific odorants”(1). Furthermore, “from a cognitive point of view the mechanism used to judge wines is closer to pattern recognition than descriptive analysis.” Therefore, when one wants to reveal the volatile “wine-like feature” pattern recognition techniques are required. Sensomics is one of the most recent “omics”, i.e. a holistic perspective of a complex system, which deals with the description of substances originated from microorganism metabolism that are “active” to human senses (2). Depicting the relevant volatile fraction in wines has been an ongoing task in recent decades to which several research groups have allocated important resources. The most common strategy has been the “target approach” in order to identify the “key odorants” for a given wine varietal.