Background: To obtain wines with a lower percentage of alcohol, the simplest approach would be an earlier harvest of the grapes. However, this has implications for the wine composition and quality, due to the lack of phenolic maturity that these grapes may present. A technological innovation that could help in this situation could be the use of ultrasound in wineries. Methods: Grapes were harvested with two different ripening levels (25.4 °Brix and 29 °Brix), transported to the winery, and vinified. Also, a large-scale high-power ultrasound system was used to treat part of the less mature grapes just after crushing. These grapes were also vinified. The three different vinifications were skin-macerated for 7 days. The wine aroma compounds and physicochemical, chromatic, and sensory characteristics were analyzed at the time of bottling. Results: The wine made with the ultrasound-treated grapes showed very similar characteristics to the wine made with the more mature grapes, especially regarding total phenol and tannin content, but with an alcohol content 15% lower than the latter. Conclusions: The results indicate that this technology could be applied to grapes to favor the extraction of grape phenolic compounds, even when grape phenolic maturity is not complete, allowing the production of quality wines with a reduced alcohol content.

The tartaric stabilization of wines before bottling to avoid the precipitation of tartaric acid salts is an important and common step during wine production. The presence of precipitated salt crystals in bottled wines is detrimental to their quality and can even be a legal issue in some countries. Different methodologies are used in wineries to substitute the classical low-temperature stabilization process, which is an effective but costly process. This study comprises two years of experiments with red wines at an industrial scale. In the first year of the experiment, two subtractive methods (ionic exchange resins and electrodialysis) were tested, whereas two additive methods (potassium polyaspartate and carboxymethyl cellulose, both of them containing gum Arabic) were tested the second year. The tartaric stability of the wines, together with the oenological, chromatic and sensory characteristics, were followed during one year in the bottle. The results indicate that carboxymethyl cellulose and potassium polyaspartate (both combined with gum Arabic) were best at maintaining the sensory and chromatic characteristics during storage, with potassium polyaspartate providing a good tartaric stability to the treated wine and this wine being, in general, preferred in a sensory analysis test.