Abstract
Substantial amounts of vine wastes are produced during vineyard management, and the chemical profiling of high-value lipophilic phytochemicals is becoming crucial in order to find a complementary route towards their integrated valorisation. The prospection of bioactive phytochemicals from unripe grape, vine shoot, vine cane, stalk and leaf dichloromethane extracts was carried out by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), analysing samples from a mixture of four red Vitis vinifera L. varieties (Baga, Aragonez, Água Santa and Shiraz), collected at Bairrada Appellation, as a representative case study of typical multi-variety Portuguese vineyards. Vine wastes showed distinct amounts of lipophilic extract, ranging from 0.68% (vine canes) to 13.35% (vine leaves) at dry weight (dw). Thirty-three components were identified, including fatty acids and alcohols, sterols and triterpenoids accounting for amounts from 118.9 mg/100 g dw to 1512.0 mg/100 g dw. The integrated study revealed that unripe grape, stalk and leaf dichloromethane extracts stood out as possible sources of triterpenic compounds (103.2 to 653.5 mg/100 g dw), with lupeol, ursolic and oleanolic acids prevailing. Leaf extract is also reported as an undervalued source of α-tocopherol, as the major component detected in this matrix (300.5 mg/100 g dw). These exploratory results are a relevant contribution for the exploitation of undervalued vine residues as a source of health-promoting components with the potential to be used as supplements or nutraceutical ingredients.
Highlights
Agricultural practices and agro-industrial activities generate millions of tons of wastes, which can lead to serious environmental concerns
The water content of the V. vinifera vine wastes ranged from 12.4% to 89.4% of the fresh samples’ weight
Vine shoots, vine canes and leaves were obtained during the vineyard management operations, and the grape stalks were obtained by removing mature grapes from the clusters
Summary
Agricultural practices and agro-industrial activities generate millions of tons of wastes, which can lead to serious environmental concerns. The production of grape crops is one of the main agro-economic activities in the world, with up to 77 million tons produced every year [3], being consumed as fresh grapes or in the formulation of products, including wine (75–80% of grape production), jam, juice, jelly, raisins, vinegar and seed oil [4,5]. Most of the research dealing with wastes from viticulture and wine-making processes has been focused on phenolic compounds (nearly 40% of the literature reports [9]), other relevant families of compounds—e.g. sterols or triterpenes— have remarkable bioactivities, and contribute to their valorisation. The presence of some of these compounds has been already reported in V. vinifera morphological parts, such as grapes [10] and stalks [11], an integrated characterization of their lipophilic fraction including different families of compounds (i.e., fatty acids, long-chain aliphatic alcohols, sterols or triterpenes) is not available in the literature
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