Agronomical assessment of a vine « terroir » map: first results in the « AOC » Minervois region

During wine production process high attention to the microbiological control from fermentation of the grape must to bottling is necessary. In fact, control of the indigenous microflora of the grape ensures correct fermentation activity of the inoculated starter, while control of the microorganisms in the finished wine is essential to prevent wine spoilage and to ensure the dominance of the desired bacteria when malolactic fermentation is required (Mas and Portillo, 2022).

AIM: Different heat tests are used to predict a white wine haze risk after bottling. The most used tests are 30-60 min. at 80°C. Nevertheless, there is a lack of information about the relationship between the wine haze observed after such tests and the turbidities observed in the bottles after the storage/transport of the wines in more realistic Summer conditions (35-46°C during 3-12 days)

Understanding the composition of wine and how it is influenced by climate or wine-making practices is a challenging issue. Two approaches are typically used to explore this issue. The first approach uses chemical
fingerprints, which require advanced tools such as high-resolution mass spectrometry and multidimensional chromatography. The second approach is the targeted method, which relies on the widely available 1-D GC/MS, but involves integrating the areas under a few peaks which ends up using only a small fraction of the chromatogram.

During wine aging, small amounts of oxygen are absorbed and initiate a cascade of oxidation reactions. These aging reactions create many products including ethylidene-bridged oligomers and polymers of endogenous polyphenols, like flavan-3ols.

“The vine and the wine are great mysteries. Only the vine makes us intelligible what is the true flavor of the earth”. Colette. The notion of terroir has always been the basis of the notion of AOC from which it is inseparable. It is moreover the definition of the production zone which was at the start of the attempts to set up the designation of origin, at the beginning of the century, after the phylloxera crisis.