Using open source software in viticultural research

Bordeaux is the largest appellation vineyard in France. This contrasting vineyard with varied terroirs offers all styles of wine, resulting from the blending of several grape varieties. If these different profiles make the renown of Bordeaux wines, it can appear as a constraint when the aim is to study Bordeaux wines in their diversity. The selection of a representative sample can be performed by a sensory analysis carried out by trained panelists or by wine professionals, which can take several forms: consensus among experts, conventional descriptive analysis, typicality or quality evaluation. However, because of time, economic, and logistical constraints, these methods have limited applications. As an alternative to classical descriptive analysis, more intuitive methods that do not require training have been proposed recently to describe wines using an expert panel such as Napping, Free Choice or Flash Profiling, CATA or RATA.

Under standard wine tasting conditions, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) responsible for the wine’s bouquet progressively invade the chemical space perceived by the consumer in the glass headspace.

Knowledge of the reflectance spectrum of grape leaves is important to the identification of grape varieties in images of viticultural regions where several cultivars co-exist.

Sulfur-like off-odours are a problem caused by the presence of free forms of volatile sulphur compounds (VSCs). H2S is the most frequently found above its odour threshold

We compared 68 aroma compounds in wines from 5 vineyards in order to see similarities among the wine aroma and the scent of some of the main native plants from the respective vineyards.