Classification of the wine-growing environment of Central Mancha (Spain). First works

Barrel ageing is a transformative process that alters a wine’s organoleptic properties and consequently its price. Even though it is considered beneficial mostly for red wines, ageing can also be used for white wines but for shorter time periods. Due to barrel costs, space requirements and the markets’ demands for fast release of each new vintage, new products such as oak chips or shavings have been developed to help minimize the time needed for the extraction of essential wood compounds.

Cet article répertorie les intérêts et problèmes du zonage viticole dans une perspective mondiale. Le zonage est un besoin pour chacun des vignobles mondiaux où il correspond à des applications, définitions et approches variées. Les objectifs du zonage changent de concert avec les besoins du marché mondial du vin, qui ne cesse de croître.

In a climate change context, the management of Mediterranean vineyards should be adapted to the new environmental conditions. Predictive models underline that in the future the most of the Mediterranean vineyard regions is expected to experience further warming events producing challenges in ripening balanced fruit. It is already registered that in warm and dry summers, the ripening process is faster and the balance between phenolic and technological (sugar) maturity may not be the desirable. This study investigates the use of specific inactivated yeast derivatives sprayed on the entire canopies of field grown cv Muscat Hamburg vines.

Today, a variety of remote sensing tools are used to characterise plant performance. However, the vine is rarely studied, as a major crop specificity is canopy discontinuity. Registered images of the vineyard are anisotropic, therefore difficult to analyse.

Cover cropping in vineyard is a sustainable and alternative soil management system to conventional tillage that is gaining more and more importance among winegrowers and is being promoted, among other organizations, by the European Union through the eco-schemes of the Common Agricultural Policy.
However, the use of cover crops in Mediterranean viticultural environments is conditioned, to a large extent, by the availability of irrigation water which, in a context of global warming like the one we are experiencing, must be adjusted to savings strategies, supplying to the vine only what it needs in each moment.