STrengthS4WineChaiN - Sinergias científicas e tecnológicas para o desenvolvimento da cadeia da vinha e do vinho na Região Norte

In recent decades, the wine industry has been the target of intense globalization and international competition, forcing the adoption of innovative strategies to counteract the resulting threats and leverage the multiple opportunities that are opening up to strengthen it. This requirement is even more crucial because in most wine-growing regions, climate change is converging towards conditions that are too aggressive for the development of vines, irreversibly compromising the viability of the crop and the quality of the grapes for wine production. In many wine-growing regions, with a climate with more or less pronounced Mediterranean characteristics, such as those studied in this project, the increasing water deficit, associated with the rise in temperature and solar radiation during much of the growing season, sometimes exacerbated by frequent extreme heat events and torrential rainfall during the summer, has resulted in serious damage to the quality of the wine and, above all, to its typicity. Thus, both at the vineyard and wine production levels, this project, focused primarily on the main wine-growing regions of Northern Portugal (Douro/Porto, Vinho Verde, Trás-os-Montes), aims to develop more technologically sustainable and long-lasting strategies for the respective viticultural ecosystems, including long- and short-term adaptation measures, to make the sector more resilient to all these changes. The basis for achieving these objectives lies in the cooperation between researchers from the Universities of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), Minho (UMinho), and Porto (UPorto). The team is multidisciplinary and has a strong ambition to contribute to ensuring that the key performance indicators (KPIs) resulting from this project can promote greater economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the wine industry in these regions. Regarding the project's positioning in terms of "technological maturity level" (TRL), taking into account the knowledge base already obtained in other projects led by the consortium beneficiaries, which can be updated and/or supplemented with the information collected in this project, it is expected that we will advance to a TRL7 at the end of the project, reaching a level where the effectiveness of the different technologies is demonstrated in an operational environment that is transversal to the entire wine chain.