EU-Vitis - Soil, water, sun: Exploring Ungrafted indigenous Italian Vitis vinifera L. varieties as a resilient resource against the effects of global climate change

Acronimo:

The enhancement of the territorial resilience against climate changes has become an inescapable priority pursued in many policy documents at regional, national, and supranational levels. Well-known local consequences of global climate change are increased drought, soil salinity, thermal stress, as well as extreme weather events. Self-rooted grapevine varieties (Vitis vinifera L.) are uncommon genetic resources that grow effectively in harsh soils, which invites to evaluate them as valuable resilient resources against climate change in particular marginal areas of viticulture. The main objective of the EU-Vitis project is to lay a solid scientific basis to understand the relationships linking pedoclimatic characteristics, vine physiological performance and grape compositional traits in self-rooted ecotypes, whose diffusion is currently limited to few territories in Italy, where plants have been and are still preserved from grapevine phylloxera. In relation to the rarity of self-rooted vines in Italy, EU-Vitis focuses on distant experimental sites: sandy coast of Emilia, hills of Calabria, slopes of Etna. In the selected sites, the diversity of genetic resources, geomorphological characteristics, soil properties (sandy or volcanic soils), grafting or self-rooting, provides sufficient experimental material to undertake comparative analyses in the field.
The collaborative research proposal EU-Vitis has been developed jointly by scientists from the University of Ferrara and the University of Calabria, with the scientific support of the Council for Research in Agriculture and Economics, Research Center for Viticulture and Enology. Its specific objectives have been defined with a bottom-up approach actively involving local viticulturists: (1) to increase the knowledge of self-rooted vines and their environment; (2) to collect detailed datasets concerning soil characteristics, vine physiological behaviour and grape quality parameters, as well as information on wines; (3) to identify significant relationships among the monitored parameters; (4) to increase awareness of the value of self-rooted vines in stakeholders, also by proposing geomarkers of product authenticity. The EU-Vitis work plan is organized into six problem-oriented work packages, including field and laboratory research activities, project coordination, and dissemination activities for specialists and the public. The development of EU-Vitis is mainly enabled by the multifaceted scientific expertise of its research team, where biological and geological knowledge converge in an original synthesis driven by a common interest in an important theme of great topicality and urgency. The result of EU-Vitis is the training of young researchers, the construction of rich datasets concerning self-rooted vines and their territory, the identification of robust indexes linking soil-plant-grape-wine to promote knowledge-based approaches for a more resilient viticulture in a changing environment.