Study of the vine performance and the wine composition of Tannat on the terroir of Colonia del Sacramento – Uruguay

Over the past two years, the AWRI has received 69 wine samples suspected of being affected by mousy off-flavour. The character has been mostly observed in white wines.

Climate is one of the main drivers of spatial and temporal variability in grapevine physiology and therefore a key determinant of grape composition and final wine value. The world has warmed 1.1 °C since pre-industrial times, and the latest IPCC report indicates an additional 0.5 to 1.3 °C of warming by mid-century with continental locations warming at a greater rate than the oceans.

Nutrient availability – nitrogen, lipids, vitamins or oxygen – has a major impact on the kinetics of winemaking fermentations. Nitrogen is usually the growth-limiting nutrient and its availability determines the fermentation rate, and therefore the fermentation duration. In some cases, in particular in Champagne, grape musts have high nitrogen concentrations and are sometimes clarified with turbidity below 50 NTU. In these conditions, lipid deficiencies may occur and longer fermentations can be observed. To better understand this situation, a study was realized using a synthetic medium simulating the composition of a Champagne must : 180 g/L of sugar, 360 mg/L of assimilable nitrogen and a lipid content ranging from 1 to 8 mg/L of phytosterols (mainly β-sitosterol).

Vine growers face an increasing number of decisions, both tactical and strategic, in a context where available data and constraints are on the rise, such as resources, societal, environmental, climatic, and economic factors. This has led to a growing supply of decision support systems (DSS) and softwares to manage vineyards. Facing this new complexity, growers must now consider several options: giving up the use of DSS, using systems that are compatible with each other but may limit their options, or using a single system that may be too complex to use effectively. In this context, itk has expanded its Vintel® tool, which was originally designed for grapevine water status management (irrigation, inter-row, cover-crop, etc.), to include fertilization and disease management.

Different terroirs have been identified in Bolgheri area (a viticultural appellation in the Tirrenian coast of Tuscany) by the aid of pedological, landscape and agronomic observations in 1993. Numerous preliminary observations suggested that wines obtained from these different terroirs were unique.