Post by Pol Giménez Gil

Just back from WAC 2026 (In Vino Analytica Scientia – Wine Active Compounds) in Dijon, a great few days of science and wine chemistry 🍷🔬 I would like to thank the committee of IVAS - WAC 2026 in Dijon for the excellent organization. 🎤 Oral presentation — "Do wine lees derived biomolecule mixtures lead to enhancing the grapevine innate immunity? A metabolomic study on Vitis vinifera leaves," presented at WAC 2026 (In Vino Analytica Scientia) in Dijon. This work is part of the ongoing effort from team RELEES (Panagiotis Arapitsas, Maroula Dimopoulou, Danai Gkizi, Alexandra Evangelou, Artemis Tsioka, George Ntourtoglou, Evangelia), and from excellent collaboration team Christina Virgiliou and Georgios Theodoridis. Looking at how wine lees-derived biomolecules can act as elicitors of grapevine innate immunity — with relevance to Plasmopara viticola resistance — through untargeted UHPLC-TIMS-QTOF metabolomic profiling of Vitis vinifera leaves. Great to share this with the community and get feedback on where the project goes next. 📊 Poster — "Process Optimization of Subcritical Water Extraction for the Recovery of Antioxidant Compounds from Wine Lees." Proud to present this with the team behind the project of my current postdoc position: Alice DOULIEZ and Claudia Nioi (ISVV – Université de Bordeaux), together with Arnaud Massot and Virginie Moine from Biolaffort. We optimized subcritical water extraction (SWE) conditions to recover antioxidant compounds from wine lees, and benchmarked their performance against SO₂ using Total Oxygen Consumption Capacity (TOCC) alongside DPPH, FRAP and TPC assays — SWE extracts showed a clear antiradical advantage per unit dose. 📌 Poster — "Characterisation of pinking precursors in Muscat and their dose-dependent accumulation in a Roditis skin-contact model," with Christina Virgiliou and Georgios Theodoridis. The core of this work is the untargeted metabolomics strategy and experimental design: we combined a natural pinking event in Muscat of Alexandria with a controlled skin-contact model in Roditis Alepou (0×, 1×, 2×, 4× native skin w/w) to simulate increasing pinking risk under HPLC-TIMS-QTOF, data-dependent acquisition. Happy to discuss the design with anyone working on oxidative browning/pinking in white wines.