Great highlands wine growing terroir: conditions and expressions

We depict the main features of five viticulture agroclimatic indices for 626 wine growing regions within 41 countries.

Terroir method has been used for assessment of growing site in the world for years. In Slovakia actually regionalisation is used as the similar method which does not cover all the elements of wine quality evaluation however.

Context and purpose of the study. Climate change scenarios predict ever increasing frequency of drought events and coupled with disease outbreaks poses survival risks to perennial fruit crops such as grapevine.

Yeasts serve as highly versatile tools in oenology. They do more than just perform alcoholic fermentation. Nowadays, yeasts from various species, naturally present in grapes, are selected for specific non-fermentative applications. For example, the use of selected non-saccharomyces at the early stage of winemaking has become a common practice to limit the growth of unwanted microorganisms. When inactivated, yeasts can be fractionated into soluble and insoluble fractions providing a wide range of benefits related to structural components or specific metabolites.

The yeast ecosystem in grape musts is quite broad and depends on the region and the health of the grapes. Within this, there are yeasts that can generate fermentative deviations and/or cause defects in the wine. It is very important to address this issue because there are significant economic losses in the wine industry when the fermentation process and/or the organoleptic characteristics of the wine are negatively affected, even more today since climate change has a marked effect on the composition of this ecosystem. The aim of this work is to characterize the behavior regarding detrimental oenological features of potential spoilage yeasts isolated from viticultural environments.