Metabolomics in grape and wine: Definition, current status and future prospects

One of the main challenges that face the modern wine sciences is how to optimise grape and wine production in order to have a minimum environmental footprint, lower production costs, as well as how to improve or maintain the quality of the wine produced. It has been generally accepted that a single analytical technique will not provide sufficient information about the wine metabolome and therefore a holisticomics approach is suggested for a more comprehensive analysis. Metabolomics is an emerging field in grape and wine research enabling chemical and biochemical profiling of samples (e.g. grapes, wine) in order to obtain insight into its biological characteristics and properties. By means of a literature review of the most recent published reports on the use of the metabolomics approach, the aim of this paper is to provide with an overview on the use of this approach in grape and wine research. Most of the studies presented in this review have highlighted the importance of metabolomics in wine science, as well as emphasised on the need of a multidisciplinary team approach where the participation of scientists from different disciplines such as biology, biochemistry, chemistry and chemometrics (mathematics and statistics) being equally important to deliver successful and reliable data, in order to improve our knowledge about wine. The combination of different techniques provides both the research and industry with powerful and complementary tools that differ from the conventional routine methods currently in use by the grape and wine industry.