Metabolomics to Understand the Impacts of Wildfires on Wines

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Okanagan Valley is one of Canada’s premier wine producing regions. Wines produced in the Okanagan can be damaged by exposure to wildfire smoke. We hypothesized that exposure to wildfire smoke creates a terroir signature that can be detected by metabolomics. Our study developed a high-resolution mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approach to characterize the nonvolatile metabolites that are accumulated in grapes exposed to wildfires and retained throughout the wine-making process. We developed a method for wine metabolomics by reversed-phase chromatography with compound detection by high-resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-OrbiTrap MS). Data was extracted, aligned, and filtered by MZMine version 3.9.0 and analyzed with MetaboAnalyst, SIRIUS, and ZODIAC for ranking of formula candidates, CSI/FingerID to identify the structures of compounds, COSMIC to assign a confidence score to CSI/FingerID structure identifications, and CANOPUS to predict compound classes. More than 90 significant features were identified as being characteristic of the smoky wine, and two novel hypotheses were generated regarding nitrogen cycling physiology and flavonoid metabolism in wine grapes. This research contributes valuable insights into the broader impact of climate-induced challenges on wine composition and quality.