Sustainablity of vineyards in the Priorat region (NE Spain)

Aim: This study aimed to evaluate whether irrigation of Touriga Nacional in Douro Demarcated Region (DDR) can partly mitigate the negative impacts of ongoing climate change on grapevine yield and quality and its impact on plant metabolism.

Background: Aroma compounds are important secondary metabolite in grapes and play important roles in the flavor and quality of grape berries and their wines. Vitis amurensis grape belongs to the East Asian Vitis spp., with excellent cold and disease resistance, and exhibits strong brewing potential. However, it has not been effectively utilized and there is no systematic research on the aroma compounds of V. amurensis grapes.
Methods: To provide sufficient experimental evidence for the characteristic aroma of V. amurensis grape, HS-SPME-GC/MS was used to identify the aroma compounds of five V. amurensis (‘Beiguohong’, ‘Beiguolan’, ‘Shuangfeng’, ‘Shuanghong’, ‘Shuangyou’) and three interspecific hybrids (‘Beibinghong’, ‘Xuelanhong’, ‘Zuoyouhong’) grapes in Zuojia and Ji’an. The grape berries were collected at harvest in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

In 2020, 12% of all bottled German wines were aromatized, which may increase further due to rising popularity of dealcoholized wines. As sealing polymers of a bottling line absorb aroma compounds and may release them into regular wines in the next filling¹, this unintentional carry-over bears the risk to violate the legal ban of any aromatization of regular wine. However, following EU legislation, German food control authorities accept a technical unavoidable transfer of aroma compounds, if this is of no sensory significance.

Micro(mi)RNAs are small non-coding RNAs that regulate several pathways and are widely recognised as key players in plant development, tissue differentiation, and many other important physiological processes, including plant adaptation to biotic and abiotic stresses. The release of plant genomes and the application of high throughput sequencing have considerably extended miRNA discovery across many species, including grapevine (Vitis spp.). Despite their relevance in plant development, functional studies in grapevine to clarify the function of miRNAs are not yet available. Through the grapevine genetic improvement platform IMPROVIT at CNR-IPSP (http://www.ipsp.cnr.it/en/thematics/turin-headquarter-thematics/improvit/), we developed integrated approaches to discover miRNA function in grapevine.

The elemental composition (the ionome) of grape leaves is an important indicator of nutritional
health, but its genetic architecture has received limited scientific attention. In this study, we
analyzed the leaf ionome of 131 interspecific F1 hybrid progeny from a Vitis rupestris (♀) X Vitis
riparia (♂) cross. The progeny were replicated in New York, South Dakota, Southwest Missouri ad Central Missouri, and the concentration of 20 elements were measured in their leaves at
three different phenological stages during the growing season. In leaves collected at the apical node at anthesis, elemental concentrations correlated in a consistent manner (p < 0.05) across all four geographic locations. In subsequent phenological stages, elemental ratios in the apical-node leaves remained consistent across the South Dakota and New York sites, but not across the Missouri sites. In leaves collected at the basal and middle nodes, correlations varied greatly across all locations.