Climate change – variety change?

In Chile there is a dry farming area known as a traditional wine region, where varieties brought by the Spanish conquerors still persist. These varieties, in general, are cultivated under traditional systems, with low use of technical and economic resources, and low profitability for their grapes and wines. In this region, as in other wine grape growing areas, climatic conditions have changed significantly in recent decades. In particular, the occurrence of spring frosts, when bud break has already begun, have generated significant losses for these growers.

Controlling the speed of alcoholic (AF) and malolactic (MLF) fermentations in wine can be an important challenge for the production of certain short rotation wines for entry-level market segments. Immobilization techniques for Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Œnococcus œni, the microorganisms responsible for these fermentations, are widely studied for industrial applications. Indeed, these processes allow to accumulate biomass and thus to increase cell densities inducing high fermentation velocities. Recent works have shown the performance of MLF carried out with biofilms of O. œni, immobilized on various supports in a rich medium (MRSm: modified MRS broth with malic acid and fructose).

Copper is listed among the active substances candidates for substitution (Regulation EU 2015/408). Yet still, because of the lack of valid alternatives, the European Commission recently confirmed its usage authorization by limiting the maximum amount to 28 Kg per hectare in 7 years, i.e. an average of 4 kg/year (Reg. EU 2018/1981).This restriction is due to copper accumulation in soils and surface waters both caused by a steady application, especially on perennial crops (Riepert et al., 2013). The aim of this work is to determine if treatments with reduced copper dosages are able to reach different grapevine’s organs, with particular focus on the core of bunches, and if these small amounts can ensure the respect of the legislative prescription, without compromising the phytosanitary conditions of the vineyards, thus grape yields.

Interest in the pairing, or matching, of wine with music goes way back, with commentators initially using musical metaphors merely to describe the wines that they were writing about. More recently, however, this has transformed into a growing range of multisensory tasting events in which wine and music are deliberately paired to assess, or increasingly to illustrate, the impact of the latter on

The notion of terroir covers multiple components, from geology, pedology, geomorphology and climatology (Doledec, 1995), to aspects that are less well identified but which also intervene in the “typicality” of wines. This justifies the “zoning” approach (Moncomble and Panigaï, 1990) to define homogeneous areas, under the same agro-viticultural management and also identified at the product level (Morlat and Asselin, 1992).