What's the most important factor when it comes to the way a wine tastes? The grape, the weather, the temperature, the winemaker, the glass or the terroir? Well, what about the microbes that ferment the grape juice and turn it into vino?
Research here in New Zealand has revealed that the yeast that do the fermentation may be playing a much bigger role than we've traditionally thought, and that the wine growing regions have different types of yeast creating very distinct mixes of chemicals in the wine.
Sarah Knight from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland recently published a paper in Nature's microbial ecology journal ISME.
Photo: Quinn Dombrowski / CC BY-SA 2.0
