You are in : Home › Project : “Quality of Red Wine”: Color, astringency and stability

AREA III. Maturation and enology
Project 10:

“Quality of Red Wine”:
Color, astringency and stability

Stability
Wine stability throughout time is a key requirement, which must be achieved without generating a negative effect on quality. This project seeks practical and economically reasonable solutions to the problem of cold stability in red wines, trying out new techniques and setting up a problem solving service for stability issues, available to the industry. It seeks to provide methodologies and tools, which based on objective analysis techniques, may help to resolve wine stability problems scientifically, thus enabling producers to attain greater quality consistency, in line with the market where the products are to be sent.

The new enological service available to the industry will allow producers to resolve quality control issues during bottling and to pinpoint the causes of muddiness in bottled wines. The development of new stabilization methods shall help to obtain wines with ensured commercialization potential and / or with lower production costs and no losses attributed to quality, which will result in enhanced competitiveness.

Color and Astringency
Red wine quality is one of the main foundations of competitiveness in the Chilean wine industry. This quality is largely the result of the phenolic composition of wine, through the latter’s contribution to color, astringency, body and other in-mouth sensations. In this respect, grape quality is essential. Hence, grape-growing practices which determine a balanced phenolic composition play a key role.

This project intends to study the management of grape-growing conditions leading to the optimization of grape phenolic composition, particularly with respect to light intensity and the environmental conditions surrounding the cluster.

The Objective of this project is to provide methodologies and tools, which based on objective analysis techniques, may allow the scientific control of color, astringency, and in-mouth sensations of red wine so that wineries may produce wines which satisfy consumer preferences and have greater quality consistency.