Mesoclimate and Topography influence on grape composition and yield in the AOC Priorat

Climatic variability studies at fine scale have been developed in recent years with the reduction of material cost and the development of competitive miniaturized sensors. This work is forming part the LIFE-ADVICLIM project, of which one of the objectives is to model spatial temperature variability at vineyard scale. In the Bordeaux pilot site, a large network of data loggers has been set up to record temperature close to the vine canopy. The reduced distance between plant foliage and measurement equipment raises specific issues and leads to an increased rate of outliers compared to data retrieved from classical weather stations. Some of these were detected during data analysis, but others could not be easily identified. The present study aims to address the issue of data quality control and provide recommendations for data processing in climatic studies at fine scale.

Characteristics related to the climate and the soil of Montefalco in the centre of Italy have been defined in order to evaluate their influence on the red cv.

Il Nebbiolo, uno dei vitigni più rappresentativi della viticoltura piemontese. é caratterizzato da una maturazione tardiva, una elevata vigoria e una bassa fertilità basale. La sua popolazione inoltre presenta una tale variabilità morfologica che é consuetudine suddividere il vitigno in diverse sottovarietà (Lampia, Rosé, Michet, Balla per citare solo quelle dell’areale albese) ognuna con presunte distinte caratteristiche morfologiche e produttive.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of vineyards with organic practices and the use of copper as the only fun-gicide against downy mildew raises again the question of the effect of copper on varietal thiols in wine, especially 3-sulfanylhexan-1-ol (3SH) and its acetate (3SHA). A few decades ago, several works indicated that the use of copper in the vineyard had a negative effect on the content of varietal thiols in Sauvignon blanc wines [1, 2]. However, these studies only considered the concentration of the reduced form (RSH) of varietal thiols, without quantifying the oxidised ones. For this purpose, we proposed to monitor both reduced and oxidised forms of varietal thiols in wine under copper stress during alcoholic fermentation to have a more complete picture of the biological and chemical mechanisms.

In order to study the impact of climate change on Bordeaux grape varieties and to assess the behavior of candidate grape varieties potentially better adapted to the new climatic conditions, an experimental vineyard composed of 52 grape varieties was planted in 2009 at the INRAE Bordeaux Aquitaine center[1]. Among the many parameters studied since 2012, berry weight for each variety was measured weekly from mid-veraison to maturity, with four independent replicates. The kinetics obtained allowed to study berry growth, a key parameter in grape composition and yield.