The influence of climate on the grapevine phenology and content of sugar and total acids in the must

La délimitation de l’aire de production d’une appellation d’origine contrôlée française est une opération essentielle. Le décret-loi du 30 juillet 1935, qui a créé le système des appellations d’origine contrôlées

Aging on lees (AOL) has been used for wine aging for a long time, thanks to its ability to modify wine composition, improving sensory characteristics and stability. However, the prolonged contact with fermentation lees may increase the risk of developing sensory defects, due to the growth of unwanted microorganisms. Furthermore, AOL requires a large amount of work to manage bâtonnage and for topping up the barrels, significantly increasing production costs.

The wine producing regions of South Africa are characterized by climatic diversity. The Coastal Region has a Mediterranean climate, with a mean annual rainfall of c.

“The Human being has an excellent ability to detect and discriminate odors but typically has great difficulty in identifying specific odorants”(1). Furthermore, “from a cognitive point of view the mechanism used to judge wines is closer to pattern recognition than descriptive analysis.” Therefore, when one wants to reveal the volatile “wine-like feature” pattern recognition techniques are required. Sensomics is one of the most recent “omics”, i.e. a holistic perspective of a complex system, which deals with the description of substances originated from microorganism metabolism that are “active” to human senses (2). Depicting the relevant volatile fraction in wines has been an ongoing task in recent decades to which several research groups have allocated important resources. The most common strategy has been the “target approach” in order to identify the “key odorants” for a given wine varietal.

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.