Analysis of cleaning water used in the wine industry: Part I – Pesticide selection

The use of water in wineries is widespread and reaches its peak during the harvest of the vineyard, when it is used to clean and disinfect barrels, tanks, pipes, tools, for pushing the product and dragging the grape juice, for preparing fermentations, and so on. In this sense, according to the European Directive 2020/2184, pesticides in supply water must be analysed to avoid possible contamination in wines. Due to the lack of data on the number of or the pesticides to be analysed in water as required by this Directive, the aim of this work was to select the pesticides to be analysed on the basis of a risk assessment methodology. Information on pesticide water solubility, pesticide water persistence and pesticide oral lethal dose from Pesticide Properties Database was used to build a logistic regression model to predict risk. The pesticides listed in the EURL database for grapes and the information from the pesticides used in the different Spanish Designations of Origin (DOCa) were applied to the logistic regression model. The results obtained showed that only the 25 % of the pesticides pose a high risk and that only the 5 % of these pesticides are used in the different DOCa studied.