Proceedings of the 19th GiESCO International Meeting (2015)

The French official catalog now includes more than 350 varieties. Each year, new varieties join the list. With, anytime, the ambition to give opportunities to meet the challenges that wine industry is facing. High hopes and expectations are based on the vine material in order to face climate change, reduction of chemicals or the ability to maintain the competitiveness.

It is 40 years since I made my first harvest of Syrah vines in the hot climate of Griffith, NSW, Australia. The commercial vineyards of the region were healthy and vigorous, extensively cultivated with heavy and wide tractors, own-rooted, flood irrigated, relatively high yielding (to 30 t/ha), hand pruned and harvested, and with non-positioned, highly-shaded canopies producing bulk wine in general.

Grapevines are cultivated on 6 out of 7 continents, between latitudes 4° and 51° in the Northern Hemisphere and between 6° and 45° in the Southern Hemisphere across a large diversity of climates (oceanic, warm oceanic, transition temperate, continental, cold continental, Mediterranean, subtropical, attenuated tropical, and arid climates).

A production system is sustainable if it meets four conditions: it is profitable, accounts for environmental and social expectations and ensures product safety. The challenges for sustainability in the vineyard and winery overlap partially. The latest Australian Wine Industry Environment Conference highlighted four aspects relevant to sustainability: profitability, water, energy and warming climate.

For the last forty years, Swiss research in Viticulture was focused on a model of sustainable production. One of its central objectives is the selection of grapevines adapted to the Swiss pedoclimatic context and highly resistant to the main cryptogamic diseases.

Spatial variability in soil properties causes variability in vine performance. Ideally, irrigation should be applied differentially throughout the vineyard in order to compensate for soil variation and optimize both fruit yield and quality. A variable rate irrigation (VRI) system was implemented in early 2013 in a 4-hectare area inside a drip-irrigated Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard measuring
12.5 total hectares.

Organic and biodynamic viticultural practices have received much attention, especially by premium grape growers worldwide. This growth is coupled by a demand for organic and alternative methods of agriculture due to increasing consumer concern regarding food quality and safety. The aim of this study was to compare vine performance, berry composition and wine quality of four management systems: Biodynamic (BD), Organic (ORG), Low Input Conventional (LCON) and High Input Conventional (HCON).

Demand and production of organic and biodynamic crops have been growing exponentially in the last decades around the world. The organically managed viticultural surface in Europe increased substantially from 43.000 ha in 1998 to 230.000 ha in 2011, corresponding to around 5.3 % of all vineyards within Europe.

Conventional vineyard practices have lead in many environmental disturbances as soil erosion, soil compaction, loss of organic matter and soil biodiversity, water contamination, … Therefore, there is an increasing interest to develop sustainable viticulture in the Champagne vineyard since 25 years: a huge program called “VITI 2000” has been developed since 1990 by CIVC in collaboration with researchers.

Algeria by its potentialities of soil and climate constitutes a natural habitat for vines, especially the indigenous vine whose genetic diversity remains to valorize. Our study is part the objective of the ampelographic characterization of 21 cultivars of vines belonging to the collection of the regional station Benchicao (Medea), for identification and determination of the relationships between them and grouped according their similarities.