«Observatoire Mourvèdre»: statistical modelling of quality for Cv. Mourvèdre

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.

Drought stress has a profound impact on grapevine productivity and significantly alters key quality-related traits of berries. Although research has been conducted on the effects of individual drought events, there is still a knowledge gap regarding the cumulative consequences of repeated exposure to water scarcity and the influence of the timing of stress imposition. To address this gap, a field experiment was conducted to investigate the impacts of repeated drought stress on yield, berry composition, and the phenolic profile of grape berries. The results indicate that yield is primarily influenced by pre-veraison water deficit. Although the number of clusters was only slightly reduced, a substantial decrease in berry size was observed, resulting in a notable reduction in overall yield.

A large varietal collection including over 1700 varieties was maintained in Conegliano, ITA, since the 1950s. Phenological data on a subset of 400 grape varieties including wine grapes, table grapes, and raisins were acquired at bud break, flowering, veraison, and ripening since 1964. Despite the efforts in maintaining and acquiring data over such an extensive collection, the data set has varying degrees of missing cases depending on the variety and the year. This is ubiquitous in phenology datasets with significant size and length. In this work, we evaluated four state-of-the-art methods to estimate missing values in this phenological series: k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations (mice), MissForest, and Bidirectional Recurrent Imputation for Time Series (BRITS). For each phenological stage, we evaluated the performance of the methods in two ways. 1) On the full dataset, we randomly hold-out 10% of the true values for use as a test set and repeated the process 1000 times (Monte Carlo cross-validation). 2) On a reduced and almost complete subset of varieties, we varied the percentage of missing values from 10% to 70% by random deletion. In all cases, we evaluated the performance on the original values using normalized root mean squared error. For the full dataset we also obtained performance statistics by variety and by year. MissForest provided average errors of 17% (3 days) at budbreak, 14% (4 days) at flowering, 14.5% (7 days) at veraison, and 17% (3 days) at maturity. We completed the imputations of the Conegliano dataset, one of the world’s most extensive and varied phenological time series and a steppingstone for future climate change studies in grapes. The dataset is now ready for further analysis, and a rigorous evaluation of imputation errors is included.

This study aims to evaluate the interest of using an under-vine cover crop as a sustainable management tool replacing herbicides or tillage to control weeds, evaluating its effects on yield and berry parameters in a semi-arid climate. 
The performance of Trifolium fragiferum as an under-vine cover crop was evaluated in 2018 and 2019 in a Merlot vineyard in

Balsamic vinegars of Modena (Italy), namely Aceto Balsamico di Modena PGI (AB PGI) and Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena PDO (ABT PDO) are among the most important geographical indication products for Italy. ABT PDO, despite its very limited production, is recognized as one of the most representative Italian artisan gastronomic products, and it is known and commercialized all around the world. The economic value of ABT PDO (“affinato” and “extra-vecchio” types, depending on the aging), prepared following a traditional way and aged for many years in a set of barrels (transferring a certain amount of vinegar from one cask to another in a decreasing “topping up” procedure) is great, when compared to AB industrially prepared with caramel. AB PGI is certainly the most widespread industrial-type vinegar in the world, deriving from low-temperature condensed grape must (or cooked must) mixed with wine vinegar, obtaining balsamic vinegars with a caramel-like taste. Depending on its economic value, ABT PDO is often object of fraud, requiring to fight counterfeit products and imitations.