Characterising the chemical typicality of regional Cabernet Sauvignon wines

The term “terroir”, originated in France, comprises the interaction of soil, climate, and topography with the vines of a specific variety and may be extended to the human impact due to the active choice of viticultural and oenological treatments.

Aims: This work summarizes some of the upmost recent studies and valorization strategies concerning the Prosecco wine production area. After the geographical denomination Prosecco (DO) was strongly reformed in 2009, the newborn DOCG (controlled and guaranteed DO) and DOC (controlled DO) areas have required different and specific strategies to promote and protect the value of their production.

Grape ripening is a critical phenophase during which many metabolites driving wine quality are accumulated in berries. Major changes in berry composition include a rapid increase in sugar and a decrease in malic acid content and concentration. Its duration is highly variable depending on grapevine variety, climatic parameters, soil type and management practices.

Heatwaves or extreme heat events can be particularly harmful to agriculture. Grapevines grown in the Douro winemaking region are particularly exposed to this threat, due to the specificities of the already warm and dry climatic conditions. Furthermore, climate change simulations point to an increase in the frequency of occurrence of these extreme heat events, therefore posing a major challenge to winegrowers in the Mediterranean type climates. The current study focuses on the application of the STICS crop model to assess the potential impacts of heatwaves in grapevine yields over the Douro valley winemaking region. For this purpose, STICS was applied to grapevines using high-resolution weather, soil and terrain datasets over the Douro. To assess the impact of heatwaves, the weather dataset (1989-2005) was artificially modified, generating periods with anomalously high temperatures (+5 ºC), at certain onset dates and with specific durations (from 5 to 9 days). The model was run with this modified weather dataset and results were compared to the original unmodified runs. The results show that heatwaves can have a very strong impact on grapevine yields, strongly depending on the onset dates and duration of the heatwaves. The highest negative impacts may result in a decrease in the yield by up to -35% in some regions. Despite some uncertainties inherent to the current modelling assessment, the present study highlights the negative impacts of heatwaves on viticultural yields in the Douro region, which is critical information for stakeholders within the winemaking sector for planning suitable adaptation measures.

Somatic embryogenesis (SE) has been used in a variety of biotechnology applications such as virus elimination, cryopreservation, induced mutagenesis and genetic transformation. The SE induction process may cause DNA alterations and ploidy changes, which may provide a source of genetic variability useful for the improvement of agronomic characteristics of plants. This research aims at investigating the spontaneous alterations of the genome in grapevine plants regenerated through SE. Regenerants obtained from different embryogenic events from three different grapevine genotypes (Catarratto, Frappato and Nero d’Avola) were analysed.