qNMR metabolomics a tool for wine authenticity and winemaking processes discrimination

With climate change, the occurrence of wildfires has increased in several viticultural regions of the world. Subsequently, smoke taint has become a major issue, threatening the sustainability of the wine industry.

Climate change is introducing a high variability on grape ripening, causing uncertainty, excessive spending on pesticides and eventually frustrating results in terms of the quality of the vintage, with the increasingly frequent appearance of aromatic problems associated with overripeness, raisining and greenness, which sometimes only appear in bottled wines.

Plants have been shown to redistribute water between root sections and soil layers along a gradient of decreasing water availability. One benefit of this hydraulic redistribution is that water can be transported from roots in wet soil to others in dry soil, delaying the onset of water stress and increasing root longevity in dry environments. Grapevines are thought to redistribute water laterally across the trunk from wet to dry portions of the root system. However, it is unknown whether the phloem contributes to such water redistribution.

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly present challenge, whether due to an increase in the level of perception and demand from consumers and stakeholders or the rise of events linked to climate change, which directly impacts agricultural-based sectors such as the vine and wine industry.

In Italy, in the past two decades, the rate of temperature increases (0.0369 °C per year) was slightly higher compared to the world average (0.0313 °C per year). It has also been indicated that the number and intensity of heat waves have increased considerably in the last decades. (IEA, 2022). Viticultural zones can be classified with climatic indexes. Huglin’s index (HI) considers the temperature in a definite area and has been considered as reliable to evaluate the thermal suitability for winegrape production (Zhang et al., 2023).