Climate, grapes, and wine: structure and suitability in a variable and changing climate

The balance between the different flavours of a wine largely determines its perception and appreciation by the consumers. In white wines, sweetness and sourness are usually the two poles balancing the taste properties. The bitter flavour, on the other hand, is frequently associated with a loss of equilibrium and all white wines (dry and sweet, young and aged) are affected.
Several bitter compounds are already well-described in wines.

The use of different tank materials during red wine aging has become increasingly popular, but little is known about their impact on wine chemical and physical parameters.

Grape composition is of high interest for producing quality wines. For that, grape analyses are necessary, and they still require sample preparation, whether with classical analyses or with NIR analyses.

Aim: Early leaf removal, generally applied before flowering, is mostly conceived as a technique to control grape yield and improve the health of grapes and focused on the final objective of increasing wine quality.

Water tolerance in plants is often associated with the accumulation of osmotic protectants, which are secondary metabolites that can help the plant to cope with water stress. One of the key osmotic protectants is a sugar called Raffinose, which is synthesized by a family of enzymes called Raffinose synthases. In this work, we focused on one of these enzymes, VviRAF2, which is a gene that shows different expression levels and genetic variants (SNPs) among different grapevine cultivars, ranging from tolerant to susceptible to water stress, and the transcription factors that may regulate the expression of this gene family.