Wine Fermentation

Book excerpt: Wineries are facing new challenges due to actual market demands for the creation of products exhibiting more particular flavors. In addition, climate change has lead to the requirement for grape varieties with specific features, such as convenient maturation times, enhanced tolerance towards dryness, osmotic stress, and resistance against plant-pathogens. The next generation of yeast starter cultures should produce wines with an appealing sensory profile and less alcohol. This Special Issue comprises actual studies addressing some of the problems and solutions for the environmental, technical, and consumer challenges of wine making today: Development of sophisticated mass spectroscopic methods enable the identification of the major metabolite spectrum of grapes/wine and deliver detailed insights in terroir and yeast-specific traits;Knowledge of the origin and reactions of reductive sulphur compounds facilitates the avoidance of unpleasant wine odors;Innovative physical–chemical treatments support effective and sustainable color extraction from red grape varieties;Enological enzymes from yeasts used directly or in the form of starter cultures are promising tools to increase the juice yields, color intensity, and aroma of wine;Natural and artificial Saccharomyces hybrids as well as collections of adapted wild isolates from various ecological niches will extend winemakers repertoire, allowing individual fermentations;Exact process control of wine fermentations by convenient computer programs will guarantee consistently high product quality.