This is part 2 of our History of Yeast series! Read part 1 here.
Initially, all that was done with these scientific advances was to duplicate the existing practice in winemaking and brewing. Large winery and brewery operations isolated their own strains, cleaned up any spoilage organisms, and then grew their desired historically derived selection to make next year’s wine more reproducible.
In the mid-1900s along with the creation of stainless-steel equipment that could be made to be sanitized and the creation of the cleaners and sanitizers themselves all of a sudden the possibility of an isolated “pure” culture of yeast to do your fermentation was taking place. You might even have options of where you could source your yeast from, and you were no longer beholden to getting your yeast on the grapes to make your wine or at the mercy of mixed microbial fermentation.
Today, in the modern world, things are commercialized, and yeast companies can and do make yeast to sell for wine, beer, bread, and many other fermented things. Historically or initially, the companies offered yeasts isolated from the famous regions to help winemakers in all appellations emulate the flavor profiles and somewhat unique taste profiles of these famous historical regions. Or in the case of Prisse De Mousse (PDM), the most commonly used wine yeast in the world it is selected because it gets the fermentation done WITHOUT giving significant flavor or aroma impact to the wine allowing the grape characters to shine through and be completely represented in the wine. By using a commercially grown active dry yeast, you get a consistent yeast that gives expected flavor and aroma results consistently year after year, as opposed to using naturally occurring yeast in a mixed culture fermentation that can mutate and bring changes to your end result. Native fermentation can go great one year; the next year, it can taste like rotten eggs. That is one reason winemakers use cultured yeast.
In the early days of modern winemaking, if a winemaker wanted to make a Cabernet, the yeast of choice was probably a Bordeaux yeast that was commercially available to get the best-tasting wine. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, winemakers started experimenting in America. Science allowed the forcing of mutations through selective breeding situations – for instance, two yeasts would exchange genetic material and have 1,000 offspring. Then scientists would take the 1,000 offspring and ferment them, and 10 of them would be interesting for winemaking. Further fermentations would be conducted until at last one or two commercially acceptable yeasts would be produced. That is how modern yeasts have been produced to solve certain high-alcohol tolerance problems or to not produce H2S or to produce the Rosa character.
Today, winemakers have great options in yeasts to consider, including Maurivin PDM, Maurivin BP725, and Maurivin AWRI 796.
To learn more, or to discover the breadth of RCNA’s yeast catalog, please click here:
