Validation of a high-throughput method for the quantification of volatile carbonyl compounds in wine and its use in accelerated ageing experiments

Levels of esters derived from substituted acids increase during the first years of aging and some of them are strongly involved in red wine fruity aromatic expression.

Tomatoes and Grapes are berries that are genetically related and therefore at least partially their developmental pathways leading to a fleshy fruit should share some of the components. In a sense knowledge obtained from the model plant tomato could be useful for grape and conversely the more amenable tomato can be used to test some hypothesis that would be difficult to obtain in grape. Research in my lab and other labs have led to a better understanding of the molecular genetics mechanisms underlying fruit development and ripening in tomato and more specifically those related to metabolite accumulation that may lead to changes in fruit nutritional and flavor composition. This research has involved the use of genetic variability in natural population, but also biparental population and genetically engineered lines that are easy to develop in tomato tomato but not in grape. NGTs also can be easily implemented in tomato to not only speed up the gene-to-trait but also develop new tomato varieties.

In Ancient Egypt, wine was a luxury product consumed mainly by the upper classes and the royal family and offered to gods in daily religious rituals in the temples.
Since the Predynastic (4000-3100 BC) period, wine jars were placed in tombs as funerary offerings. From the Old Kingdom (2680-2160 BC) to the Greco-Roman (332 BC-395 AD) period, viticulture and winemaking scenes were depicted on the private tombs’ walls. During the New Kingdom (1539-1075 BC), wine jars were inscribed to indicate: vintage year, product, quality, provenance, property and winemaker’s name and title.

The effect that some extraction techniques, such as ultrasound (Cacciola, Batllò, Ferraretto, Vincenzi, & Celotti, 2013; Povey & McClements, 1988) or microwaves (Carew, Close, & Dambergs, 2015; Carew, Gill, Close, & Dambergs, 2014) produce on the aroma of red wines, when applied to processes of extractive nature, such as pre-fermentative maceration or ageing with oak chips (Spanish oak – Quercus pyrenaica and French oak – Quercus robur) has been studied. The volatile profile was determined by means of gas chromatography coupled with olfactometric and mass spectrometric detection. A sensory analysis was also carried out. No indications were found to show that the pre-fermentative treatment with microwaves or ultrasound modified the sensory profile of the wines whereas the application of such energies during the ageing phase showed some positive trends at sensory level.

The synthetic herbicide glyphosate has been used extensively in viticulture over many decades to combat weeds. Despite this, the possible influence of residual glyphosate on both the alcoholic fermentation of grape juice and the subsequent metabolite profile of wines has not been investigated. In this study, Pinot noir juice supplemented with different concentrations of glyphosate (0 µg L-1, 10 µg L-1 and 1000 µg L-1) was fermented with commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast strains. Using a combination of analytical methods, 80 metabolites were quantified in the resulting wines.