Effect of vine nitrogen status on grape and wine quality: Terroir study in the Vaud vineyard (Switzerland)

L’identification des produits par le nom de la ville, de la région, de la province d’origine d’un produit tend aujourd’hui à se développer partout dans le monde et notamment dans le secteur agro-alimentaire, mais aussi dans les secteurs des produits artisanaux.

This paper describes the first year results of a study that investigated the effects of altitude and related temperature parameters on the biosynthesis of aromas in the Italian cultivar Glera.

Vineyard canopy features such canopy porosity and fruit exposure influenced microclimate, fungal disease incidence and grape composition. An objective, rapid and non-invasive method to assess and map the canopy status is needed to apply in precision viticulture. A new method for canopy status assessment and mapping based on non-invasive machine vision was applied in commercial vineyards in this work.

Cis-acting regulatory elements are DNA sequences that can be bound by transcription factors to regulate the expression of genes in a condition-dependent and tissue-specific way. It is nowadays possible to search for DNA motives and sequences that a given transcription factor is binding or at least can, but it is still hard to have a glance at all the transcription factors that are contemporaneously located at the same locus. Inspired by an existing technique that uses the CRISPR-Cas system in mammal cells, we are trying to develop a protocol to study such regulation in Vitis vinifera. Using the highly sequence-specific binding capacity of a catalytically inactive Cas9 protein (dCas9), our idea is to set up a system to target a desired sequence and precipitate all the crosslinked proteins and distantly interacting chromatin at this locus and analyze them.

Grapes composition is a factor well known to affect wines composition and sensory expression. The goal of this study was to evaluate how grapes composition modifications linked to maturity level could affect wines aromatic expression and esters composition.