Better Wine Through Chemistry

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Description

The single most important step to making a good wine is fermentation, which is what gives wine its particular taste and alcohol content. Winemakers add yeast—a single-celled fungus—to grape juice, and if all goes well the yeasts rapidly multiply, crowding out other microbes and allowing fermentation to complete in two to three weeks. But sometimes, the yeasts get stuck and don’t fully ferment—a problem that has plagued the wine industry for centuries. Now a team of geneticists and biotechnologists have discovered what triggers "stuck" fermentation, and are bringing winemakers one step closer to perfecting the winemaking process.