Terroir or Tūrangawaewae? Expressing sense of place in an emerging New Zealand wine region

loss and color browning which lead to wine unacceptance by consumers. These changes are mainly driven by the consumption of oxygen by polyphenols leading to the production of quinones which are oxidant compounds. Quinones can react with numerous nucleophilic compounds notably aromatic thiols, decreasing the aromatic bouquet of the wine.

Bentonite fining is widely used to prevent protein haze in white wines. Most wineries use laboratory-scale fining trials to define the appropriate amount of bentonite to be used in the cellar. Those pre-tests need to mimic as much as possible the industrial scale fining procedure to determine the exact amount of bentonite necessary for protein stability. Nevertheless it is frequent that, after fining with the recommended amount of bentonite, wines appear still unstable and need an additional fining treatment. It remains a major challenge to understand why the same wine, fined with the same dosage of the same bentonite, achieves stability in the lab, but not in the cellar.

Monferrato is a sub region of Piedmont featuring an endless series of hills which have been moulded through the centuries by laborious farming. Vineyards have always been the protagonists of Monferrato landscape. Asti vineyards have been well-known since Roman times and Pliny the Elder mentions them.

Among nitrogen compounds included in white wines, the peptide fraction is certainly the least studied, however this fraction is quantitatively the most important (Feuillat, 1974). Existing studies concern the fraction below 1 kDa and only for white and sparkling wines (Bartolomé et al, 1997, Desportes et al 2000). In this report, we have developed methods to isolate peptides from reference white wines. Then, we have applied this methodology with bitter wine to answer a research question: is there a relation between peptides and the bitterness of white wine as for some cheese for example (Furtado, 1984)?

AIM: The composition and quality of wine are directly linked to microorganisms involved in the alcoholic fermentation. Several studies have been conducted on the impact of Saccharomyces cerevisiae on volatile compounds composition after fermentation. However, if different studies have dealt with combined sensory and volatiles analyses, few works have compared so far the impact of distinct yeast strains on the global metabolome of the wine.