Two decades of "Horse sweat" taint and Brettanomyces yeasts in wine: where do we stand now ?

ReviewThe unwanted modification of wine sensory attributes by yeasts of the species Brettanomyces bruxellensis due to the production of volatile phenols is presently the main microbiological threat to red wine quality. The effects of ethylphenols and other metabolites on wine flavor is now recognized worldwide and the object of lively debate. The focus of this review is to provide an update of the present knowledge and practice on the prevention of this problem in the wine industry. Brettanomyces bruxellensis, or its teleomorph, Dekkera bruxellensis, are rarely found in the natural environment and, although frequently isolated from fermenting substrates, their numbers are relatively low when compared with other fermenting species. Despite this rarity, they have long been studied for their unusual metabolical features (e.g., the Custers effect). Rising interest over the last decades is mostly due to volatile phenol production affecting high quality red wines worldwide. The challenges have been dealt with together by researchers and winemakers in an effective way and this has enabled a state where, presently, knowledge and prevention of the problem at the winery level is readily accessible. Today, the main issues have shifted from technological to sensory science concerning the effects of metabolites other than ethylphenols and the over estimation of the detrimental impact by ethylphenols on flavor. Hopefully, these questions will continue to be tackled together by science and industry for the benefit of wine enjoymentinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Beverage sensory modification

EditorialThe Special Issue on “Beverage Sensory Modification” gathers a series of articles that feature the broad sense of sensory modification, either by improving flavor, taste, and mouthfeel properties or by preventing their spoilage. The scope goes further than the usual technological measures that modulate sensory properties and includes the psychological and cross-modal influences, where the sensory modification is on the subject’s brain and not on the object’s physical-chemical propertiesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Multinationals and subsidiaries: A bibliometric study on Ghoshal?s managing across borders

Some scholars? imprint an academic discipline by their contribution to the manner in which we think and research, namely by putting forward novel concepts and insights. In this paper we examine the impact of Sumantra Ghoshal?s work on the study of subsidiaries and multinational enterprises and organizational formats for foreign operations. Specifically we perform a bibliometric study focused on Bartlett and Ghoshal?s well-known book ?Managing across borders: The transnational solution? to assess its impact in international business (IB) research. We examine the entire record of publications in the top leading IB journal: Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS). Theoretically supported, Ghoshal?s work was keenly influenced by his corporate experiences and his constant questioning of the dominant theories and assumptions. Our analyses show the impact of the work on the ?transnational solution? namely on the understanding of multinationals and subsidiaries, thus being one of the most notable contributions for IB research over the past twenty years.Sumantra Ghoshal, international business research, bibliometric study, transnational solution, multinational corporations, subsidiaries

Networks for change: How networks influence organizational change

This paper contributes to the literature on organizational change by examining organizations as social entities embedded in inter-organizational networks. In contrast to extant research that focuses on macro environment and internal factors to explain organizational change we put forth the social network surrounding the firm as a major driver of any change process. In specific we examine organization change as driven by the organizations? positions and relations in an interorganizational network. Our conceptual framework demonstrates that inter-organizational networks are important mid-level environmental factors that complement the macro-environment and internal organizational factors for the study of organizational changes. We conclude with a discussion on normative implications for organizations and avenues for future research.organizational change, social networks

The 2016 Wines of Portugal Challenge: general implications of more than 8400 wine-score observations

The Wines of Portugal Challenge is an annual competition among wines produced by over 1000 vintners in over 30 of the country’s wine growing regions. In 2016, judges assigned scores to over 1300 wines resulting in over 8400 wine-score observations. Analysis of that large sample yields implications about wine judges’ ratings that are difficult to detect with statistical significance in the small samples that are typical of most wine tastings. The Challenge’s frequency distribution of scores showed left skewness and local peaks just below the score thresholds for bronze, silver and gold awards. Student’s t-tests showed that there were no significant differences in scores assigned by gender-of-judge, nationality-of-judge and to wines from different regions. However, judges did assign higher scores to sweet wines than to other types of wine. While the dispersion in scores was material, p-values showed that the aggregate order of rating was very unlikely to be random and the distributions of mean scores showed that the strengths of judges’ preferences against the least-preferred wines were stronger than those in favor of the most-preferred wines. Ties between wines’ mean scores were common and could be broken by several methods including the preference probabilities implied by a Plackett-Luce modelinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Applicability of the Principles of Activity-Based Costing System in a Higher Education Institution

In view of the growing relevance of management accounting in the administration of universities, the recognition of the need for an effective costs assessment system (Jarrar, Smith and Dolley, 2007), and the profound changes that have been occurring in the structure of Portuguese universities, developing and implementing models that may actually be useful for the management of these institutions will be of major importance. The aim of this work is to present a costs assessment model, influenced by the activity-based costing (ABC) and applicable to higher education institutions. Therefore, based on the procedures used by the services of a faculty belonging to a large Portuguese university, we tried to create a model which allows the attribution of each department’s expenditure to the various cost objects – courses, research projects, services. In this way, we tried to present a model which, without being too complex, has a level of detail sufficient enough to enable the production of reliable information and which can be applied in the context of higher education institutions.Activity-based costing, Management accounting

Culturing Bursaphelenchus cocophilus in vitro and in vivo.

Red ring disease (RRD) is of particular importance in many African oil palms- and coconut-producing regions in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Its causal agent, the nematode Bursaphelenchus cocophilus (Cobb) Baujard, causes extensive damage to tissues in the plant trunk that typically leads to plant death within months. Nearly 100 years after its first report RRD remains understudied largely because the nematode cannot be cultured in vivo or in vitro, what hinders sustained research efforts on basic and applied aspects of the pathosystem. To overcome this problem we attempted in vivo culturing in coconut seedlings, paying attention to aspects that had been overlooked in previous trials. We also attempted in vitro culturing on several fungi endophytic to healthy and RRD-affected coconut trees. In the two in vivo assays performed we were able to recover hundreds of nematodes from the seedlings up to 60 days after inoculation, but the nematodes seemed unable to sustain parasitism in most seedlings. No nematode was recovered from the endophytic fungal cultures in neither of the two assays performed. Hence B. cocophilus continues to stand as the only obligatory plant-parasitic species of the speciose genus Bursaphelenchus and a somewhat intractable plant-parasitic nematode to study on

Intra-industry trade and labor costs: The smooth adjustment hypothesis

We study a situation in which, owing to the exhaustion of non-renewable energy sources, conventional motor vehicles will turn out of use. We consider two scenarios: recycling or dismantling these motor vehicles. M|G|∞ queue system is used to study the process. Through it, we conclude that if the rate of dismantling and recycling of motor vehicles is greater than the rate at which they become idle, the system will tend to get balanced. The model allows also performing a brief study about the recycling or dismantling economic interest.