Recap: From Grapes to Wines Cool Climate Webinars

Tuesday, April 6, 2021

We wrapped up six planned sessions of From Grapes to Wines Cool Climate Webinars last week. Thank you for your interest and attention in these sessions. We also thank all our speakers, Dr. Karine Pednault, Dr. Belinda Kemp, Hannah Charnock, Dr. Basile Pauthier, Dr. Matt McSweeney, Dr. Harrison Wright and Rachel Allison for their time, effort and willingness to share their work with all of us.



Our aim of organizing these webinars was to have local and international professionals to talk about different topics that are of interest of local grape growers and winemakers. Although our main target is Nova Scotia wine industry, the sessions were open to all audience. That allowed us to share the important research conducted in Nova Scotia with other cool climate wine growing regions. We were happy to see that the majority of the participants were from Nova Scotia and other provinces of Canada, but we also had participants from 15 other countries, including UK, USA, and different countries in Europe, South America and Asia.

One of the advantages of having these sessions online is the possibility to record them. We now have all the recordings of six sessions uploaded to our YouTube channel. You can watch them as a playlist from this link.  We also would like to share the individual session links, so you can choose the topics and watch on-demand the recordings that you’re interested in:


Viticulture

     1. Ripening grapes in Eastern Canada: How climate affects grape potential for winemaking

Dr. Karine Pedneault from Université Sainte-Anne talked about their studies on the impact of growing degree-days accumulation under different conditions on the chemical composition of L’Acadie blanc grape berries in Nova Scotia, using an experimental approach. She also shared their studies on the impact of harvest date on the content of compounds of oenological importance in berries in different grape varieties and conditions.

Watch here!


2. Spring frost in Champagne: Results from 100 years of research

Dr. Basile Pauthier from The Comité Champagne talked about the research made in Champagne about spring frost fighting techniques following three main axes: efficiency, environmental and economic sustainability.

Watch here!


3. Wine Grape Cold Cases: Frosts, Freezes, Bud Hardiness and Viability

Dr. Harrison Wright from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) Kentville talked about their trials and surveys examining cold weather and grapevine performance. He discussed lessons learned from the bud hardiness survey, post-spring frost and post-winter freeze pruning strategies, harvest timing and hardiness, as well as an exploration of temperature inversions and their frequency in the Maritimes.

Watch here!


Winemaking

     1. The influence of the type of sugar used, and the metal content on the flavour of sparkling wines

Dr. Belinda Kemp and Hannah Charnock from the Cool Climate Oenology & Viticulture Institute (CCOVI) talked about their studies on the relationship of metal concentrations of sparkling wines with the origin of the grapes used in the wines. They also discussed the type of sugar used in dosage of sparkling wines and how the way the sugar is made affects sparkling wine flavour.

Watch here!


 2. How do consumers describe Nova Scotia wine?

Dr. Matt McSweeney from Acadia University talked about their recent studies related to Nova Scotian wine consumers with varying knowledge about wine and its sensory properties with and how they use different words to describe wines. He also talked about how caloric values, ingredients list, and production methods affected consumers’ sensory perception.

Watch here!


 3. Flavour chemistry and canned wines

Rachel Allison from Cornell University talked about wines canned wines as one of the fastest-growing segments of the wine industry. She gave information about risk for developing ‘reduced’ aromas due to the formation of H2S and their current work in the Sacks lab that looks at the development and validation of accelerated aging tests to predict corrosion and H2S formation during long-term storage, using commercial wines and model systems.

Watch here!


We hope you enjoy the recordings and find them useful for your business. We’ll be evaluating your feedback from the conducted survey and shape the webinars for 2022. If you haven’t got a chance to fill the survey out, please feel free to e-mail us your comments directly. Thank you!