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07-05-2020
Column: Wine Chat - YEAST, THERE IS NO WINE WITHOUT IT
Column: Wine Chat - YEAST, THERE IS NO WINE WITHOUT IT
So much of our understanding about wine focuses on grape varieties that we often forget that it’s a microbiological product. It really isn’t fair that the grapes take all the glory. In winemaking there’s another major ingredient that greatly affects the character of the wine. Yeast.

In fact, If it wasn’t for yeast, we wouldn’t have wine at all!

Yeast is a single-cell organism that belongs to the fungi group. Yeasts are tiny. We can’t see them, and the only evidence of their activity is a steady stream of small bubbles of carbon dioxide rising to the surface of fermenting grape juice. But what they do is amazing; they change sweet-tasting grape juice into a much more complex, intense, alcoholic liquid.

Yeast is present on the surface of all grapes, on the vines, and in the air at the vineyard and winery. Once grapes are crushed yeast begins to change grape sugar into alcohol. The more sugar in the grapes the higher the potential alcohol of the finished wine. If all the fruit sugar is consumed by the yeast,

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