Soil and Climate Interactions with Grapevines

AIM: Tawny Port wine is produced in the Douro Demarcated Region by blending several fortified wines in different aging stages. During the aging process in small wood barrels, the red wine color progressively develops into tawny, medium tawny, or light tawny.

The recent effects on temperature and rainfall caused by global warming pose a serious threat to the wine industry worldwide, mainly in terms of a loss of quality in the wines produced.

Aromas are one of the key points in food analysis since they are related to character, quality and consequently consumer acceptance. It is not different in the winery industry, where the aromatic profile is a combination of viticultural and oenological practices. Based on the development of more aromatic clones and on the potential to produce sparkling wines at Caldas, in the southern region of Minas Gerais (Brazil) (21°55´S and 46°23´W, altitude 1,100m), the aim of this work was the determination of volatile compounds in six different clones of Chardonnay grape berries to better understand which compounds add bouquet to the wine, and additionally comprehend the impacts of the edaphoclimatic and annual conditions on the improvement of grape-growing and winemaking practices.

Spain is one of the main producers of high-quality fortified wines. Particularly some of them elaborated in Andalusia have acquired a great prestige for being unique due to their production in a specific geographical area with traditional methods, the grape variety used, the climate and the soil. Such is their distinguishing feature achieved that they have been protected by the European Union with the indication “Protected Designation of Origin” (PDO). Thus, there are four PDO of fortified wines in Andalucía (‘Condado de Huelva’, ‘Jerez Xérès Sherry’, ‘Manzanilla Sanlúcar de Barrameda’, and ‘Montilla-Moriles’). Furthermore, within each PDO,there are different categories according to their particular characteristics and winemaking conditions such as the aging process.

Developments in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies allow us to obtain large amounts of microbial information from wine and must samples. Thus approaches, that are aimed at characterising the microbial diversity during fermentation, can be enhanced, or possibly even replaced, with HTS-based metabarcoding. To reduce experimental biases and increase data reproducibility, we compared 3 DNA extraction methods by evaluating differences in the fungal diversity with Riesling alcoholic fermentation samples at four different vineyards. The fungal diversity profiling was done using the genetic markers ITS2 and D2 using metabarcoding. The extraction methods compared consisted of a commercial kit, a recently published protocol that includes a DNA enhancer, and a protocol based on a buffer containing common inhibitor removal reagents. All methods were able to distinguish vineyard effects on the fungal diversity, but the results differed quantitatively.