EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Regulated deficit irrigation effects on growth, yield, grape quality and individual anthocyanin composition in Vitis vinifera L. cv. 'Tempranillo'

L.G. Santesteban, C. Miranda and J.B. Royo

Agricultural Water Management, 2011, vol. 98, issue 7, 1171-1179

Abstract: Regulated Deficit Irrigation (RDI) is an irrigation scheduling technique, originally developed for fruit orchards, that has been successfully adapted for winegrape production. The aim of this work is to evaluate the effect of RDI in vegetative growth, yield and harvest quality in 'Tempranillo' vineyards grown under semiarid conditions typical in Mediterranean areas. Two RDI strategies were compared with conventional irrigation practices (CI). CI that consisted in a progressive increase in water deficit as summer progressed, whereas RDI strategies (RDI1 and RDI2) had in common a deficit period just after fruit set and, in RDI2, vines were subjected to an additional stress period shortly after veraison. The experiment was carried out in four consecutive seasons in a commercial vineyard. Water stress at the beginning of berry development resulted in an important reduction of both vegetative growth and berry weight in RDI strategies. No differences in sugar concentration were found between treatments, and RDI berries tended to have lower acidity. The most relevant effect of RDI strategies on grape quality was an increase in anthocyanin and phenolics concentration. In RDI1 berries, this increase was mainly an indirect consequence of smaller berry size. However, in the RDI2 treatment the higher berry anthocyanin concentration reported was not exclusively due to a reduction in berry size. Since harvest quality has been clearly improved by any of the RDI strategies in both years, it can be concluded that RDI constitutes an interesting technique to be applied in 'Tempranillo' vineyards grown in semiarid areas aiming to obtain high quality grape.

Keywords: Irrigation; scheduling; Leaf; water; potential; Carbon; isotopic; ratio; Berry; size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(11)00044-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:98:y:2011:i:7:p:1171-1179

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:98:y:2011:i:7:p:1171-1179