Alimentary film to reduce cork taint and improve wine organoleptic quality

As Vitis vinifera varieties are susceptible to fungal diseases, numerous chemical treatments are generally required to ensure the quantity and quality of the harvest. However, in the context of sustainable viticulture, there are increasing societal request, political incitation, and winegrowers’ awareness to reduce the use of pesticides.

In contrast to fruit and grape berry ripening, the biological processes causing ripening disorders are often much less understood, although shriveling disorders of fruits are manifold and contribute to yield losses and reduced fruit quality worldwide. Shrinking berries are a common feature for all shriveling disorders in grapevine although their timing of appearance during the berry ripening process and their underlying induction processes distinct them from each other. The sugar accumulation disorder Berry Shrivel (BS) is characterized by a suppression of sugar accumulation short after veraison resulting in berries low in sugar content and anthocyanins in berry skins, while the organic acid content is similar. Recent studies analyzed the biochemical, morphological and molecular processes affected in BS berries and linked early changes to the period of ripening onset [1,2].

Fermenting grape juice represents one of the oldest continuously maintained anthropogenic microbial environments and supports a well-mapped microbial ecosystem. Several yeast and bacterial species dominate this ecosystem, and some of these species are part of the globally most studied and best understood individual organisms. Detailed physiological, cellular and molecular data have been generated on these individual species and have helped elucidate complex evolutionary processes such as the domestication of wine yeast strains of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae. These data support the notion that the wine making environment represents an ecological niche of significant evolutionary relevance. Taken together, the data suggest that the wine fermentation ecosystem is an excellent model to study fundamental questions about the working of microbial ecosystems and on the impact of biotic selection pressures on microbial ecosystem functioning. Indeed, and although well mapped, the rules and molecular mechanisms that govern the interactions between microbial species within this, and other, ecosystems remain underexplored. Here we present data derived from several converging approaches, including microbiome data of spontaneous fermentations, the population dynamics of constructed consortia, the application of biotic selection pressures in directed laboratory evolution, and the physiological and molecular analysis of pairwise and higher order interactions between yeast species. The data reveal the importance of cell wall-related elements in interspecies interactions and in evolutionary adaptation and suggest that predictive modelling and biotechnological control of the wine ecosystem during fermentation are promising strategies for wine making in future.

Carbonic Maceration (CM) winemaking is typically used in different European regions. But It is paradoxical that being a traditional processing system and widely used in many wineries, some of the phenomena that take place and the parameters that characterize them are barely known. In this vinification system the intact grape clusters are placed in a carbon dioxide (CO2) enriched medium, and they immediately change from a respiratory metabolism to an anaerobic fermentative metabolism called intracellular fermentation, which is carried out by grape enzymes. But some grapes located in the lower zone of the tank are crushed by the weight of the ones above and release must, which is fermented by yeasts.

The methodology to viticulture zoning developed and proposed by Gómez-Miguel and Sotés (1992) has been studied in order to validate it. This was the main aim of this work