Current Trends and Challenges in Viticulture Using Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi

Abstract

Grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.) were one of the first fruit species to be domesticated and nowadays are the world’s most economically important fruit crop. Nowadays, at global level, viticulture is facing various challenges that need to be addressed, based on scientific support. On one hand, water scarcity in the frame of climate change scenarios is of major concern since climate models to 2050 predict that droughts would increase by the middle of the century accompanied by increases in temperature. Viticulture in Chile as a case study is very interesting due to the existence of different edaphoclimatic conditions in its nearly 4300 km from north to south, where prestigious world-class wine companies are found. Interestingly, the wine production areas have been moving fast toward the South, to areas with higher winter and spring precipitations but lower temperatures. Even though plantations have been slowly increasing in Southern Chile, viticulture is facing a new constraint such as the production on Andosols, very acidic, phosphorous (P) fixing, and prone to induced aluminum (Al) toxicity. In fact, there is a growing interest from wine producers, universities, research centers, and in general in the scientific community, in improving the understanding of the ecosystem services that could be granted by products based on microorganisms such as biostimulants that correspond to bioformulations with a scientific-technological base in which the base is made up of species of one or more microorganisms whose name in the research stage is inoculant, inoculum, or inocula. Special emphasis on high-tech agriculture has acquired arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi-based biostimulants.