In an Adelaide discovery that will change forever the styles of wine the world drinks, the Australian Wine Research Institute has cracked the genetic code of a wine yeast. This has phenomenal implications for winemakers and drinkers.
Yeast affects a wine’s aroma, flavour, structure and longevity. Microbiologists have long isolated yeasts of certain capacities to influence wines in one way or another, which they then breed, brand, and sell.
“Today, we are unlocking the potential of yeast for winemakers, using genes to our advantage, without resorting to genetic engineering,” said AWRI Managing Director, Professor Sakkie Pretorius.
The breakthrough is set to have an impact on world winemaking equal to Ian Hickinbotham conducting the world’s first deliberate malo-lactic fermentation in Coonawarra with David Wynn in 1952, and the vital findings of Ray Beckwith, who discovered the importance of pH in winemaking at Penfolds before the Second World War.
Both these discoveries are vital, but taken for granted, by winemakers the world over. But they are as important to wine as Louis Pasteur’s discovery of pasteurisation to milk and other beverages.
The WRI work can be expected to soon provide yeast which will ferment wines of high sugar to dryness, but with lower alcohols than the current average. This can help correct the awkward problems associated with ever-increasing temperatures, and alcohols of fifteen and more, as were common after the heatwave of 2008.
Stuck ferments, where the wine is spoiled when the yeast dies before completing its work, will also soon be avoidable.
Different flavour and aromatic spectrums can also be expected as new yeast strains are developed.
The research has already made possible a commercially-available yeast which produces less hydrogen sulfide during ferment (see Philip White’s comments on mercaptan in today’s wine column, page 26).
Using the new technologies of the Australian Genome Research Facility, the AWRI knocked their task over in six months.
“This is quite amazing in light of the fact that just over ten years ago, the first yeast strain to be sequenced took 70 laboratories, 10 years and cost millions of dollars” Professor Pretorius said.
“Sequencing a genome is different to genetic engineering because it does not require the alteration of DNA in a living organism. In genome sequencing we simply extract genetic material from an organism and analyse it – we do not return any of this DNA back into an organism, so nothing is engineered or reconstructed.”
But in a town transfixed with the collapse of economic structures, news of a famous new entrant in the Adelaide bicycle races, and the Adelaide football team beating Uzbekistan, the AWRI team could not have picked a worse date to make their announcement.