Soils and plant material in prestigious Bordeaux vineyards impacts on yield and quality

Aims: Forecasting the biomass allocation among source and sinks organs is crucial to better understand how grapevines control the distribution of acquired resources and has a great meaning in term of making decisions about agricultural practices in vineyards. Modelling plant growth and development is one of prediction approaches that play this role when it concerns growth rates in response to variation in environmental conditions

Astringency has been defined by the American Society for Testing Materials as “the complex of sensations due to shrinking, drawing or puckering of the epithelium as a result of exposure to substances such as alums or tannins”. Regarding the importance of astringency in wine consumer acceptance, elucidating the molecular mechanisms underpinning this complex sensation represents an important goal for scientists. Although different mechanisms have been described (Gibbins & Carpenter, 2013), the salivary protein precipitation is still the most accepted theory. According to this, wine astringency perceived in the oral cavity is originally attributed to the interaction and subsequence precipitation of salivary proteins by wine tannins –mainly flavanols–.

The shelf life of wine is a major concern for the wine industry. This is particularly true for wines intended for long cellaring, which are supposed to reach their peak after an ageing period ranging from a few months to several years, or even decades. Low, controlled oxygen inputs through the closure system are generally necessary for the wine to evolve towards its optimum organoleptic characteristics. Our previous studies have already shown that the interface between the cork and the bottleneck plays a crucial role in the transfer of oxygen into the bottled wine.

Wine cellars are affected by seasonally fluctuating workloads and face challenges especially in the harvest period connected to the required timely processing of the harvested grapes.

Ecological resources represent vegetation factors, or even production factors, in quantitative expression. These, used by plants, transformed and organized according to their genetic program, become the material components of biomass. Subsequently, the ecological resources can be used as synthetic indicators of the ecological supply, necessary for the analysis of favorability for the understanding of ecosystems.