Metcalfe, A. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2020

Wine terroir and the soil microbiome: an amplicon sequencing-based assessment of the Barossa Valley and its sub-regions

Soil is an important factor that contributes to the uniqueness of a wine produced by vines grown in specific conditions. Recent data shows that the composition, diversity and function of soil microbial communities may play important roles in determining wine quality and indirectly affect its economic value. Here, we evaluated the impact of environmental variables on the soil microbiomes of 22 Barossa Valley vineyard sites based on the 16S rRNA gene hypervariable region 4. In this study, we report that environmental heterogeneity (soil plant-available P content, elevation, rainfall, temperature, spacing between row and spacing between vine) caused more microbial dissimilarity than geographic distance. Vineyards located in cooler and wetter regions showed lower beta diversity and a higher ratio of dominant taxa. Differences in microbial community composition were significantly associated with differences in fruit traits and in wine chemical and metabolomic profiles, highlighting the potential influence of microbial communities on the phenotype of grapevines. Our results suggest that environmental factors affect wine terroir, and this may be mediated by changes in microbial structure, thus providing a basic understanding of how growing conditions affect interactions between plants and their soil microbiomes.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2017

Environmental Conditions And Agronomic Practices Induce Consistent Global Changes In DNA Methylation Patterns In Grapevine (Vitis vinifera cv Shiraz)

Fruit attributes that affect wine quality are thought to be largely driven by the interaction of grapevines genetic characteristics with environmental factors (i.e. climate, soil and topography) and vineyard management. All these variables, in conjunction with the wine making process, give a wine its distinctive character. Understanding how grapevines perceive and adapt to a changing environment will provide us with an insight into how to better manage crop quality. Mounting evidence suggests that epigenetic mechanisms are a key interface between the environment and the genotype that ultimately affect the plants phenotype. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that epigenetic mechanisms are a source of useful variability during crop varietal selection that could affect crop performance. While the contribution of DNA methylation to plant performance has been extensively studied in other major crops, very little work has been done in grapevine. Here we used Methylation Sensitive Amplified Polymorphisms to obtain global patterns of DNA methylation, and to identify the main drivers of epigenetic diversity across 22 vineyards planted with the cultivar Shiraz in six distinctive wine areas of a major wine zone, The Barossa, South Australia. The observed epigenetic profiles showed a high level of differentiation that grouped vineyards by their area of provenance despite the low genetic differentiation between vineyards and sub-regions. Furthermore, pairwise epigenetic distances between vineyards with similar management systems showed a significant correlation with geographic distance. Finally, methylation sensitive Genotyping By Sequencing identified 3,598 differentially methylated genes that were assigned to 1,144 unique GO terms of which 8.6% were associated with response to environmental stimulus. Taken together, our results indicate that the intensity and directionality of DNA methylation differentiation between vineyards and wine sub-regions within The Barossa are driven by management and local growing conditions. Finally, we discuss how epigenetic variability can be used as a tool to understand and potentially modulate terroir in grapevine.

plant biology↗