Impact of chitosan treatment on the physico-chemical features of a sangiovese red wine

Lugana wines are made from Turbiana grapes. In recent times, many white and rosé wines are bottled and stored in flint glass bottles because of commercial appeal. However, this practice could worsen the aroma profile of the wine, especially as regards the development of volatile sulfur compounds (VSCs). This study aims to investigate the consequences of exposure to light in flint bottles on VSCs profile of Lugana wines fermented with two different yeasts and with different post-fermentation residual nitrogen.

Grape ripening is a critical phenophase during which many metabolites driving wine quality are accumulated in berries. Major changes in berry composition include a rapid increase in sugar and a decrease in malic acid content and concentration. Its duration is highly variable depending on grapevine variety, climatic parameters, soil type and management practices.

Traceability of agro-alimentary products is very important to certify their origin. This work aimed to characterize wines obtained by the same cultivar (Nero d’Avola and Fiano) – grown in regions with different soil and climate conditions during three vintages (2003-2005) – employing isotopic analyses (NMR and IRMS) and sensory analyses.

Agriculture, natural resource management and the production and sale of products such as wine are increasingly data-driven activities. Thus, the use of remote and proximal crop and soil sensors to aid management decisions is becoming commonplace and ‘Agtech’ is proliferating commercially; mapping, underpinned by geographical information systems and complex methods of spatial analysis, is widely used. Likewise, the chemical and sensory analysis of wines draws on multivariate statistics; the efficient winery intake of grapes, subsequent production of wines and their delivery to markets relies on logistics; whilst the sales and marketing of wines is increasingly driven by artificial intelligence linked to the recorded purchasing behaviour of consumers. In brief, there is data everywhere!

Opinions will vary on whether these developments are a good thing. Those concerned with the ‘mystique’ of wine, or the historical aspects of terroir and its preservation, may find them confronting. In contrast, they offer an opportunity to those interested in the biophysical elements of terroir, and efforts aimed at better understanding how these impact on vineyard performance and the sensory attributes of resultant wines. At the previous Terroir Congress, we demonstrated the potential of analytical methods used at the within-vineyard scale in the development of Precision Viticulture, in contributing to a quantitative understanding of regional terroir. For this conference, we take this approach forward with examples from contrasting locations in both the northern and southern hemispheres. We show how, by focussing on the vineyards within winegrowing regions, as opposed to all of the land within those regions, we might move towards a more robust terroir zoning than one derived from a mixture of history, thematic mapping, heuristics and the whims of marketers. Aside from providing improved understanding by underpinning terroir with data, such methods should also promote improved management of the entire wine value chain.

In recent years, the ageing bouquet of red Bordeaux wines has been partially unveiled by a chemical and sensory point of view1–3. Minty and fresh notes were found to play a key role in the definition of this complex concept, moreover the freshness dimension in fine aged red wines plays an important role in typicity judgement by wine professionals