A trip to the Iberian land for the 11th edition of ENOFORUM, the technical-scientific congress of reference at the European level for the wine industry, which took place on May 31 and June 1, 2018 at the Zaragoza Fair Congress Center, underscoring the international vocation and continued growth of the event, dedicated to innovation in the sector.

Gianni Trioli, president of VINIDEA srl, the company that organizes ENOFORUM (for the Spanish edition in collaboration with EXCELL IBÉRICA), in the event’s opening greetings reiterated the concepts that have inspired the event since its first edition: “Innovation, understood as the large-scale application of new technologies that significantly improve wine production in a given region, is always the result of a collaboration between research centers, for the scientific verification of phenomena; supplying companies, indispensable financiers and full-scale developers of technologies; and cutting-edge technicians, who test the novelties and enable them to understand their potential and application limits. Where one of the three players is missing, there is perhaps prestigious research, perhaps excellent marketing, perhaps growth in a wine’s image, but there is no real innovation. Moreover, innovation today is necessarily to be sought on an international scale; a technician can no longer limit himself to knowing what is happening in his territory.”

Born in 2000 from the collaboration between VINIDEA and SIVE (Italian Society of Viticulture and Oenology), ENOFORUM has always involved the three innovation players (research centers, supplier companies, technicians) on a global scale, concentrating in one place and in a few days a complete overview of what has been produced new in recent years.
Thanks to the sponsorship and collaboration with numerous associations and representative bodies of the Spanish and international wine industry, since its first edition on Aragonese soil ENOFORUM has presented itself as the leading technical-scientific congress of the sector in the Iberian Peninsula as well: in two days, in fact, the nearly 500 participants were able to attend 41 oral presentations by national and international researchers, visit 15 stands of companies supplying the industry’s cutting-edge, participate in 8 demonstration tastings of different styles of wine and different technological solutions for processing, and view 23 posters of scientific papers.

As proof of the attention paid to the world of research, the sessions dedicated to the ENOFORUM Research for Development Prize, worth €5,000, sponsored by EXCELL IBÉRICA, were well-attended, and thanks to the adoption of modern technologies aimed at facilitating interactivity, they allowed each participant to express his or her assessment of the quality of the papers presented, as well as to formulate questions or propose comments and share experiences. Twenty scientific papers participated in the competition, of which 12 were selected by the Scientific Committee to be presented orally at Enoforum 2018.

The winner was María Ángeles del Pozo Bayón, of the Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Alimentación (CIAL) CSIC-UAM, who with colleagues Adelaida Esteban-Fernandez, Maria Perez-Jimenez, Celia Criado, and Carolina Muñoz-González (CSGA-INRA) presented the results of her research on “Advances in the Knowledge of Chemical, Biochemical, and Physiological Factors Involved in the Retronasal Aroma of Wine During Consumption.”

They received the highest scores in the evaluation, in addition to the winner (in alphabetical order of the main author):
– María Paz Diago Santamaría, Juan Fernández-Novales, Salvador Gutiérrez, Javier Tardáguila, Instituto de Ciencias de la Vid y del Vino (Universidad de La Rioja, CSIC, Gobierno de La Rioja) with the paper, “NIR spectroscopy and hyperspectral vision: non-invasive and rapid techniques to determine the composition of intact grapes”
– Juan Manuel Martínez, Marcos Andrés Maza, Ignacio Álvarez y Javier Raso, Universidad de Zaragoza, with the work “Reducing the aging time sur lie of Chardonnay wine by electroporation”

The 11th edition of ENOFORUM will also be remembered for being organized with the collaboration of numerous entities that play a role in Spanish and international wine innovation. In addition to the OIV, which has granted moral patronage to ENOFORUM for numerous editions, this year’s event also saw the support of the Plataforma Tecnológica del Vino, the Conferencia Española de Consejos Reguladores Vitivinicolas, the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial, and the winemakers’ associations of Rioja, Cataluña, Castilla y Leon, Castilla la Mancha, and Aragon.

Recordings of Enoforum presentations are published in the INFOWINE Internet magazine.