Variability in intrinsic water use efficiency (WUEi) of eight red varieties grown in the center of the Iberian Peninsula during an atypical vintage year

Wine viticulture, being firmly linked to the vine-terroir relationship, has always encountered significant bottlenecks to genetic innovation. Nonetheless, the development of new breeding strategies leading to the selection of stress resilient genotypes is urgent, especially in viticulture, where it would allow reducing the use of chemical treatments adopted to control fungal diseases. Genome editing represents an extremely promising breeding technique. Unfortunately, the well-known recalcitrance of several wine grape cultivars to in vitro regeneration strongly limits the exploitation of this approach, which to our knowledge has so far been developed on table grape genotypes with high regeneration potential.

Crimson Seedless’ (Vitis vinifera L.) is a late-ripening, red seedless table grape cultivar with inadequate anthocyanin accumulation and less than ideal berry size issues

Toasted pruning vine-shoots represent a promising new enological tool for developing wines with chemical and organoleptic high quality, allowing that the resources of the vineyard to be returned to the wine through a “circular process”.

Volatile phenols namely 4-ethylphenol and 4-ethylguaiacol are formed by enzymatic decarboxylation of hydroxycinnamic acids by Brettanomyces yeasts to give vinylphenols and subsequent reduction of the vinyl group to form the correspondent ethylphenols. The presence of these compounds in wine affects negatively its aromatic quality, conferring unpleasant animal and phenolic odor when present in quantities above the olfactory detection threshold [1]. Several methods have been described to remove these undesirable compounds from wines, including the use laccase enzymes [2, 3]. Due to this, the aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of several natural redox mediators on the activity of Botrytis cinerea laccase against these volatile phenols.

AIM. Grape seeds (Vitis vinifera) are among the main constituents of grape pomace, also exploited in ingredients for nutraceutics and cosmeceutics, particularly regarding the phenolic fraction. The macromolecules of grape/wine include polyphenols, proteins and polysaccharides.