Understanding and managing wine production from different terroirs

The effects of climate change in viticulture are currently a major concern, with heat waves and drought affecting yield, wine quality, and in extreme cases, even plant survival. Ancient grapevine varieties have high intravarietal genetic variability that so far has been explored successfully to improve yield and must quality. Currently, there is little information available on intravarietal variability regarding responses to stress. In the current work, the intravarietal genetic variability of several Portuguese varieties was studied for yield, must quality, and tolerance to abiotic stress, through indirect, rapid, and nondestructive measurements carried out in the field.

Sensory analysis is an essential component of oenology, offering valuable insights into wine quality that influence decision-making in viticulture and 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.

Irrigation of vineyards is a matter of controversial arguments at areas of high quality wine production. Besides, the effects of the water in the plant are closer related to the water availability than to the irrigation regime.

S’il n’existe pas de réglementation officielle, la démarche des vins naturels prône un retour aux pratiques dites ancestrales préconisant notamment un mode d’élaboration des vins utilisant le moins d’intrants possible. Le seul autorisé reste l’anhydride sulfureux (SO2) à des doses quatre à cinq fois moins importantes que pour les vins dits conventionnels. Ce désir de renouer avec