Assessing reserve nitrogen at dormancy for predicting spring nitrogen status in Chardonnay grapevines

The chemical composition of wines depends on series of variables such as the type of grape, edaphoclimatic conditions, and viticulture and winemaking practices employed during production. Metallic elements play a significant role during winemaking (e.g. as catalysts of oxidation reactions) and have been previously employed for the classification of wines according to provenance. In this work, we focused on the analysis of metallic elements (K, Na, Ca, Zn, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Ni, Cr, Al, Pb, Cd, Hg, Se, Co, Sn and As) in 145 Chilean wine samples (102 reds and 43 white wines), of seven grape varieties, and five of the major wine producing regions in Chile.

The sequential activity of miR156 and miR172 controls the juvenile to adult phase transition in many plant species, where miR156 abundance decreases while miR172 increases along plant development. Very little is known about phase transition in horticultural woody species, which show substantially long vegetative phases. In grapevine, phase transition seems to be dissociated, displaying a first transition from juvenile to adult vegetative state in the first year, coincident with tendril differentiation and a subsequent induction of inflorescences in place of some of tendrils in later years under flowering inductive environmental conditions. Since grapevine is a highly heterozygous species, the generation of genetically homogeneous material for replicated transcriptomic analyses from seed-derived plants was a main challenge.

Sulfonated monomeric and dimeric flavan-3-ols are recently discovered in wine and proved to have great importance in understanding wine chemistry and quality [1, 2].

The overall quality of fine wines is linked to the development of “bouquet” during wine bottle ageing1. Several chemical reactions, occurring in atmosphere protected from oxygen, are favourable to the formation and preservation of sulphur compounds such as dimethyl sulfide (DMS). DMS accumulate in wines thanks to hydrolysis of its precursors (DMSp) mainly constituted by S-

From a chemical composition point of view, wine is the result of complex interplays between environmental, genetic and human factors. The notion of terroir in viticulture involves the vine and its environment, including phenology, geography, geology, pedology and local climate of a vineyard, along with human inputs.