Calabrian Wine: metagenomics and archeology

3.3.2023

Wine is a crop for which the Calabrian terroir effect has been demonstrated.

The ‘‘terroir concept’’ has become popular in many parts of world. Originally developed for wine, it is now applied to many other quality crops, but surely mainly for wine. Although it is well recognized that vineyard soil is one of the main factors characterizing terroir, it is also well known that soil properties can vary markedly even within a single field, so that a vineyard, for instance, can produce two or more contrasting types of wine. The optimization of agricultural husbandry in relation to soil characteristics is the main focus of Agriculture in Calabria.

METAGENOMICS OF CALABRIAN WINE

In Calabria, a considerable proportion of typical foods, such as dairy products, olive oil, wine, fruits and vegetables, and cereals are of so called “Mediterranean origin”. They are protected by
a ‘denomination of origin’ and the analytical methodologies used for the geographical identification of food products are numerous and for the most part experimental. The most important are DNA analysis and the
chromatographic, spectroscopic, and mass spectrometry techniques.
DNA analysis, using the DNA-barcoding methodology, allows a fingerprint for every product to be identified, guaranteeing its origin and quality.

Another very important perspective for Mediterranean wine and Calabrian one, particularly, is the “environmental” DNA sequences, unique to every species or subspecies, to be utilized like a ‘‘bar code’’ to identify a product by comparing them with a database containing the sequences of all known species. This approach is called “Metagenomics of Wine”

In 2009 a metagenomic experiment was conducted in Sila about potatoes (three types of soil were identified and their related metagenomic markers), the extension of the method to wine is still only a future persepctive. The process is the identification of so-called molecular markers for the traceability of the agricultural food chain, and it can become a new challenge for the protection of high-quality products.

In the world, instead, the last 2 decades have been characterized by an important change in the approaches used for microbial examination, due to the introduction of DNA-based community fingerprinting methods such as DGGE, SSCP, T-RFLP, and ARISA. These approaches allowed for the exploration of microbial community structures without the need to cultivate, and have been extensively applied to decipher the microbial populations associated with the grapevine as well as the microbial dynamics throughout grape berry ripening and wine fermentation.

These techniques are well-established for the rapid more sensitive profiling of microbial communities and these metagenomics approaches to vineyard microbial ecology especially unravel the influence of vineyard management practices on microbial diversity.

ARCHEOLOGY OF WINE AND MEDITERRANEAN WINE-MAKING

A very important attempt to identify the metagenomic origin of wine of rice was done by some Chinese scientists (we are citing the well known article “Metagenomic sequencing reveals the relationship between microbiota composition and quality of Chinese Rice Wine”, Xutao Hong, Jing Chen, Lin Liu, Huan Wu, Haiqin Tan, Guangfa Xie, Qian Xu, Huijun Zou, Wenjing Yu, Lan Wang & Nan Qin, – in Scientific Reports volume 6, Article number: 26621, year 2016).

The recent metagenomic experiment about the wine of rice is very interesting when we remember that the first archeological traces of wine can be actually found in China, in 7,000 B.C., when first type of wine in human history was a fermented mixture of honey, “rice”, grapes and hawthorn berries. Further, rice wine is still a widespread beverage in China today, while the first pure wine of grapes can be dated to 6,000 BC and geographically placed in the region of Georgia and the Caucasus in general.

Recent news of 2023 refer that the origin of the grape and that of the wine, which have so far been an unsolved mystery, date back even 11 thousand years ago, thanks to two domestication events geographically separated by more than 1,000 kilometers but similar in the result.
They occurred in Western Asia and the Caucasus region. It was reconstructed by the largest genetic analysis ever conducted, which examined over 3,000 samples of vine varieties also coming from private collections and specimens never documented. From that area the wine making, then, spread to the Phoenician, Greek and Latin world…

Map of Vitis vinifera (Neolithic period). Image Credit: Science journal

The study is published in the journal Science, also conquering the cover, by the international group led by the Chinese Agricultural University of Yunnan, the State Laboratory of Agricultural Genomics in Shenzhen and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, with the Italian collaboration of the Universities of Milan, Milan- Bicocca and Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, of the National Center for Biodiversity (Nbfc) of Palermo and of the National Research Council (Cnr).

Particularly, the Chinese scientists investigated the influence of microbial composition on the quality of rice wine, and sequencing was performed for 110 wine samples on bacterial 16S rRNA gene and fungal Internal Transcribed Spacer II (ITS2).

Bioinformatic analyses demonstrated that the metagenomics of rice wine is marked by Lactobacillus brevis. These results led to a conclusion that metabolisms of microbes influence the wine quality and can mark it.

PERSPECTIVE: CALABRIAN OENOLOGY AND WINE ARCHEOLOGY

The new techniques of Metagenomics are a new wide open field for proving the best quality of Calabrian soils and of their vineyards. Further, archeology of wine can avail of this method to investigate history of wine in the south of Italy, as environmental heritage of Phoenician, Greek and Latin history into Calabrian wines.

Bergamot is Calabria’s anti-Covid-19 gold

18.2.2021

PROPERTIES

Bergamot could be the weapon capable of inhibiting the coronavirus. Bergamot is full of vitamin C and flavonoids that make it an excellent cholesterol lowering agent and an antibacterial potentially capable of inhibiting Covid-19, according to a recent study from the universities of Milan and Genoa.

In the past, the research of the University La Sapienza in Rome, carried out in collaboration with the Universities “Vita-Salute” of Genoa and “San Raffaele” of Milan, shed light on the potential of Naringenin, which would be able to inhibit infectious process of Covid-19.

The hills of Calabria, the land of Bergamot

MARKET AND HISTORY

In Italian houses, 3,000 tons of bergamots are transformed per year into juice, jams, honey, hydro-alcoholic gels, but above all into essential oil. This small green citrus fruit with powerful properties is the object of a juicy business in southern Italy: 90% of its production comes solely from the hills of Calabria. Like the lemon tree, bergamot comes from a cross-made from bitter orange. The Arabs who long occupied Calabria in the middle Ages could have imported it.

Narigenina

A NEW PERSPECTIVE AGAINST COVID-19

The intuition was born in the laboratory of the Unit of Histology and Medical Embryology of Antonio Filippini, at the Roman University: it was thought that the proliferation of the coronavirus could be prevented by inhibiting a specific molecular target responsible for the progression of the virus as soon as it enters the cell. Currently, the study is in the verification phase and the results of the first tests seem to confirm the original intuition of the Italian researchers.

Naringenin, as the Italian Society of Pharmacology explains, is a compound of the flavonoid family, which is commonly found in plants. It has antioxidant and immune system modulating activity, is found in large amounts in grapefruit, bergamot and, to a lesser extent in lemon, oranges and tangerines. Above all, naringenin, the very molecule at the center of the anti-Covid-19 scientific study, derived from the polyphenol contained in bergamot juice, in addition to the “anti-cholesterol” activity which has just been seen, increases the uptake of glucose in the muscles and the liver, therefore it helps to lower blood sugar and improve insulin activity.

The one against the Coronavirus is only the last frontier on the benefits of bergamot on health. There are, in fact, several scientific studies, which show how the flavonoids contained in bergamot have an action very similar to that of synthetic statins, that is to say, they block the enzymes of cholesterol synthesis.

S. Raffaele Institute

In fact, other studies then show how the use of bergamot juice also helps lower the levels of LDL, “bad” cholesterol, and increase the levels of HDL, “good” cholesterol.

Bergamot, given the high content of vitamins C, B1, B2, which improve iron absorption, is useful in supporting therapy for anemia. Green gold from Calabria is an excellent appetite stimulant and, due to its high content of critical acid, is effective against intestinal parasites.

Finally, the antioxidant properties of bergamot juice increase the activity of enzymes with antioxidant action, limit the production of free radicals on the walls of blood vessels and neutralize inflammatory mechanisms.