Soils, climate and vine management: their influence on Marlborough Sauvignon blanc wine style

Bentonite fining is commonly used in oenology to remove all or parts of white wine proteins, which are known to be involved in haze formation. This fining is effective, but has disadvantages: it is not selective, thus molecules responsible for aroma are also removed, it causes substantial volume losses, and finally it generates wastes. Over the last decades, the knowledge of wine proteins has increased: they have been identified, their structures are known, some of them have been crystallized.

Cet article répertorie les intérêts et problèmes du zonage viticole dans une perspective mondiale. Le zonage est un besoin pour chacun des vignobles mondiaux où il correspond à des applications, définitions et approches variées. Les objectifs du zonage changent de concert avec les besoins du marché mondial du vin, qui ne cesse de croître.

Reducing sugar accumulation in grape (Vitis vinifera L.) berries may be a way to mitigate the effect of climate change. Managing canopy and crop load is an effective way to do so, however, reducing canopy size has been demonstrated to induce undesirable effects on anthocyanins. The aim of this study was to test if an application of exogenous ABA on the grape berries of defoliated vines (⅔ of the leaves removed) can result in slower sugar accumulation while maintaining grape and wine quality. An experiment with defoliation and exogenous ABA application on directly on clusters (factorial design 2×2) was performed with ‘Tempranillo’ fruit-bearing cuttings.

The use of toasted vine-shoots as an alternative enological tool to make differentiated wines has generated interest among researchers and wineries. However, the evolution of these wines in bottle and the effect on the sensory profile has not been studied so far.

The Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization–Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) technology is commonly used in food and medical sector to identify yeast or bacteria species isolated from a nutritive culture media. Since a decade, brewery and oenology industries have been attracted to this method which combines fast analysis times, reliability and low cost of analysis. Briefly, this method is based on the comparison of the MALDI-TOF/MS protein spectra of an isolated colony of yeast or bacteria with those contain in a manufacturer’s reference protein spectra database. Initiated in 2015, the creation of the first oenological mass spectra database has proved to be essential for increase quality of species identification.