Caratterizzazione varietale della CV. Vranac del Montenegro: primi risultati

Grape quality is a complex trait that mainly refers to berry chemical composition, including sugars, organic acids, phenolics, aroma and aroma precursor compounds.

Soil is a reservoir of microorganisms playing important roles in biogeochemical cycles and interacting with plants whether in the rhizosphere or in the root endosphere. Through rhizodeposition, plants regulate their associated microbiome composition depending on the environment and plant factors, including genotypes. Since the phylloxera crisis, Vitis vinifera cultivars are mainly grafted onto American Vitis hybrids. Rootstocks play a pivotal role in the grapevine development, as the interface between the scion and the soil.

In the current scenario of climatic variability, even though the vine (Vitis vinifera) is a species generally considered very fertile, the process of bud differentiation is particularly influenced by the weather trend not only of the current year but also of the previous one.

Amarone is an Italian red wine produced in the Valpolicella area, in north-eastern Italy. Due to its elaboration with withered grapes, Amarone is a rather unique example of dry red wine. However, there is very limited data so far concerning the volatile composition of commercial Amarone wines, which also undergo a cask aging of 2-4 years before release. The present work aims at characterizing the aroma composition of Amarone and to elucidate the relationships between chemical composition and sensory characters.

Newer sequencing technologies have allowed for the addition of microbes to the story of terroir. The same environmental factors that influence the phenotypic expression of a crop also shape the composition of the microbial communities found on that crop. For fermented goods, such as wine, that microbial community ultimately influences the organoleptic properties of the final product that is delivered to customers. Recent studies have begun to study the biogeography of wine-associated microbes within different growing regions, finding that communities are distinct across landscapes. Despite this new knowledge, there are still many questions about what factors drive these differences. Our goal was to quantify differences in yeast communities due to management style between seven pairs of conventional and biodynamic vineyards (14 in total) throughout Oregon, USA. We wanted to answer the following questions: 1) are yeast communities distinct between biodynamic vineyards and conventional vineyards? 2) are these differences consistent across a large geographic region? 3) can differences in yeast communities be tied to differences in metabolite profiles of the bottled wine? To collect our data we took soil, bark, leaf, and grape samples from within each vineyard from five different vines of pinot noir. We also collected must and a 10º brix sample from each winery. Using these samples, we performed 18S amplicon sequencing to identify the yeast present. We then used metabolomics to characterize the organoleptic compounds present in the bottled wine from the blocks the year that we sampled. We are actively in the process of analysing our data from this study.