Yeast as part of Terroir

S

SFJoe

Joe Dougherty
I can't access the full article, but an interesting abstract here describing regional variations in yeast and in native ferments in New Zealand. Not shocking to me, but nice to see the work getting done.
 
Would love to read the whole report.

So: "Humans have harnessed yeasts since the dawn of civilisation to make wine."

Was this our first civilized action, or was this the act that first civilized us?
 
originally posted by Jeff Connell:
Would love to read the whole report.

So: "Humans have harnessed yeasts since the dawn of civilisation to make wine."

Was this our first civilized action, or was this the act that first civilized us?
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Considering that the oldest known cuneiform tablet is a recipe for making beer, I believe that either side could be effectively argued. Someone (Michael Pollan, perhaps?) has argued that a likely impetus for settling down into communities and farming crops was the desire to make beer. When I get to a stable Internet connection in 5 days, I'll be able to access that Nature article. PM me if you'd like a copy.

Mark Lipton
 
Thanks to the comrades who were kind enough to share the paper with me.

The conclusions are pretty strong--different regions of the North Island (West Auckland, Waiheke Island, and Hawkes Bay) have recognizably distinct yeast populations on grapes. The grape populations are diverse and mostly non-Saccharomyces. They also went back to wineries and sampled 75% converted fermentations, where they unsurprisingly found a lot of Saccharomyces (to be expected in high alcohol environments), in 274 different flavors. Only one of these was identical to a commercial strain, though six others had some similarity. Quite a few ferments had multiple cerevisiae strains active.

I am not terribly surprised, but I think quite a few folks will have their notions (commercial strains always dominate, etc.) overturned.
 
No, I'm saying they failed to find cloned S.c. In native ferments.

Sorry, BB won't let me uncap that I.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Jeff Connell:
Would love to read the whole report.

So: "Humans have harnessed yeasts since the dawn of civilisation to make wine."

Was this our first civilized action, or was this the act that first civilized us?
Click to expand...

Considering that the oldest known cuneiform tablet is a recipe for making beer, I believe that either side could be effectively argued. Someone (Michael Pollan, perhaps?) has argued that a likely impetus for settling down into communities and farming crops was the desire to make beer. When I get to a stable Internet connection in 5 days, I'll be able to access that Nature article. PM me if you'd like a copy.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

I'm hoping this is a joke. I can't cite articles but I remember, when team teaching a Darwin course, the anthro prof saying that the most current research (including field research with remaining hunter-gatherer groups) indicated that the motive for moving to agriculture was to support a larger population than hunting and gathering was capable of, since no one in his or her right mind would choose agriculture over hunting and gathering as a way to make a living. The alternative earlier theory had reversed cause and effect, arguing that larger populations followed upon the shift to agriculture. The notion that the motive force was to make alcohol raises more questions than it answers since if hunter gatherer societies knew about fermentation prior to engaging in agriculture, then they would hardly have to give up their whole way of life just to make that one product. And if they didn't know, how would they have found out to make the shift? Even if one argues that they would have made the shift in order to make much more of it,the arguments against engaging in that massive change in the number of hours one spends laboring in order to get drunk more at the end of the day would still be a strong one.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
No, I'm saying they failed to find cloned S.c. In native ferments.

Sorry, BB won't let me uncap that I.
Click to expand...

hm, can the argument that S.C.'s evolution was a result of human processes and any regional variation is minimal? Seems as though S.C. whether cultured or natural has an evolutionary benefit of being able to withstand alcoholic environments and push out other yeasts. I have heard the argument that even naturally started fermentation ends up being dominated by S.C. which muddles the terroir/yeast paradigm from that perspective. This article appears to be presenting a new perspective completely based on variant S.C.? Is the aerobic processes of these variant strains any different? I would love a copy of this article if anyone can get themselves to give a poor newbie one.
 
Considering that the oldest known cuneiform tablet is a recipe for making beer, I believe that either side could be effectively argued.
Click to expand...

No it isn't. The text you are probably referring to is the Hymn to Ninkasi, which gives some idea of what the brewing process was like. It is a 19th C. text - Mesopotamian cuneiform had been a full writing system (i.e. capable of expressing sounds as opposed to a limited writing system which doesn't convey sounds to the reader but ideas) for over a thousand years at that point and had several thousand years more history as a limited writing system.

[...]anthro prof saying that the most current research (including field research with remaining hunter-gatherer groups) indicated that the motive for moving to agriculture was to support a larger population than hunting and gathering was capable of, since no one in his or her right mind would choose agriculture over hunting and gathering as a way to make a living. The alternative earlier theory had reversed cause and effect, arguing that larger populations followed upon the shift to agriculture.
Click to expand...

Indeed. It has long been a mystery why settlements appeared in the Near East when there was so much wild barley and other foodstuffs that getting a surplus was very simple. Hans Jörg Nissen (in that great classic of archeology, The Early History of the Ancient Near East 9000-2000 BC) says that there are still areas where it is possible to collect enough wild barley in one hour to satisfy a person's need for several days. Nissen also makes the good point that early agriculture was so haphazard that people had to have other means of getting food as well - so farming and hunting and gathering co-existed in the same community for millennia. Why the change to agriculture took place is still a mystery, but there is some evidence in the Near East to suggest that though there was enough food until c.9000 BC for the whole population (and even great surpluses), climate change occurred and made the area drier and thus incapable of supporting so many people. Hence, a more laborious means to get food had to be adopted. I like the climate change idea, but little research has been done on it so far.
 
originally posted by wrrntl:
originally posted by SFJoe:
No, I'm saying they failed to find cloned S.c. In native ferments.

Sorry, BB won't let me uncap that I.
Click to expand...

hm, can the argument that S.C.'s evolution was a result of human processes and any regional variation is minimal?
Click to expand...

Given that human beings have used S.C. for fermenting and baking, it is a dead certainty that there has been a human influence on its evolution. But that doesn't entail any consequential lessening of regional variation. Naturally occurring S.C. would, as a result of geographical isolation, almost inevitably radiate into populations with genetic distinctions, as the article abstract notes was the case. Of course, human introduction of S.C. from elsewhere would affect those population groups. But unless the human introduction of a common form was so massive as to decimate, as opposed to change, local populations, distinctions among those populations might change, but they wouldn't necessarily lessen. Of course, if the full article shows overwhelming elision of geographical radiation, I take it all back.

A much more likely cause of change to local populations would occur as a result of human winemaking processes, even "natural ones," in specific regions and localities. For instance, the ripeness of Southern Rhone wines has led to strains of local yeast that can ferment dry above 15%. I don't know if that's occurred elsewhere.
 
I like the fact that we have a collection of wine geeks who are nerdy enough to read Nature in his/her spare time...Pretty cool.

Now I have nothing to add on the topic.

-mark
 
fuck food. brewing was most likely all about concocting a non toxic fluid intake... which is of course, all the more important if your goal is to go a huntin' and a gatherin'

fb.
 
No it isn't. The text you are probably referring to is the Hymn to Ninkasi, which gives some idea of what the brewing process was like. It is a 19th C. text - Mesopotamian cuneiform had been a full writing system ( i.e. capable of expressing sounds as opposed to a limited writing system which doesn't convey sounds to the reader but ideas ) for over a thousand years at that point and had several thousand years more history as a limited writing system .
Click to expand...

a little task for you. go learn a little about, say, chinese orthography versus, say, english orthography, and get yourself a wider idea of the question of what it means for an orthographic system to convey acoustic information. then go learn a little about what all this entails for the problem of characterizing representations of "phonology" (our ideas about which, it tuns out, are hopelessly derived from orthographic systems). then ask yourself what all this means for the game of explaining easy shit, like ideas and stuff...

then drink a glass of your chosen poison, and reflect on the fact that the world is a much more wonderful and baffling place than easy interweb generalizing makes it seem sometimes.

fb.
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Nissen also makes the good point that early agriculture was so haphazard that people had to have other means of getting food as well - so farming and hunting and gathering co-existed in the same community for millennia.
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Interesting. So, the agriculture experiment had sufficient motivation behind it for farmers to keep working at it even though it was a long time not productive enough for the hunter-gatherer types to stay home.

Does Nissen (or others) say what was done with the early harvest products? If they were all eaten then they were responding to a need for calories but if some were traded to other tribes then perhaps this "farming" is really a commercial enterprise.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Naturally occurring S.C. would, as a result of geographical isolation, almost inevitably radiate into populations with genetic distinctions, as the article abstract notes was the case. Of course, human introduction of S.C. from elsewhere would affect those population groups. But unless the human introduction of a common form was so massive as to decimate, as opposed to change, local populations, distinctions among those populations might change, but they wouldn't necessarily lessen. Of course, if the full article shows overwhelming elision of geographical radiation, I take it all back.

A much more likely cause of change to local populations would occur as a result of human winemaking processes, even "natural ones," in specific regions and localities. For instance, the ripeness of Southern Rhone wines has led to strains of local yeast that can ferment dry above 15%. I don't know if that's occurred elsewhere.
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"Geographical isolation" for variation and even speciation is easier to achieve with beasties that don't get carried around by insects or the wind or truck tires.

The article notes both local natives and also immigrants that have bred into the local population.

These things are complicated with microbes.

Most S.c. probably get on very well without grapes, wine, or humans. There are many fruits in the forest.
 
a little task for you. go learn a little about, say, chinese orthography versus, say, english orthography, and get yourself a wider idea of the question of what it means for an orthographic system to convey acoustic information.
Click to expand...

It is true that my knowledge of writing systems is based on my studies of Mesopotamian cuneiform and Luwian hieroglyphs and a general interest in writing systems instead of Chinese. So, since you apparently are acquainted with Chinese, tell me what I got wrong. My impression of it is that it is a full writing system that can be further categorized as a logosyllabic system. As the sinologist John DeFrancis writes in his book Visible Speech, a full writing system is "a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey any and all thought." Chinese can. So if you're suggesting that it's just picture writing, then I'm afraid you're the one who is going to have to go study more about writing systems.

I can see how this can be confusing since the Chinese language is strange in consisting almost entirely of monosyllabic words, and with a writing system with thousands of signs it can seem like a pure logographic system, but it actually isn't. Pure logography can never be a full writing system, because it contains no phonetic information. Chinese, however, does contain a mixture of purely logographic signs and phonetic signs - just like cuneiform and Luwian hieroglyphs. I can't give you examples, however, because I've never studied the language. But I have seen examples in books dealing with writing systems; and I have also seen how Chinese speakers can read foreign names written with the Chinese script. That if anything should convince anyone that the system DOES contain phonetic information.

Some languages like Finnish contain a high proportion of phonetic symbols in script (though even Finnish of course doesn't come close to actual phonetic notation), and it is true that on the spectrum between pure phonography and pure logography, Chinese certainly stands much closer to the pure logography part. But it still is a full writing system.

Or was it the distinction between limited and full what got you so upset? I don't see why - that is a very useful distinction. If you don't believe me, go and write a Shakespeare sonnet in traffic signs.

then go learn a little about what all this entails for the problem of characterizing representations of "phonology" (our ideas about which, it tuns out, are hopelessly derived from orthographic systems). then ask yourself what all this means for the game of explaining easy shit, like ideas and stuff...

then drink a glass of your chosen poison, and reflect on the fact that the world is a much more wonderful and baffling place than easy interweb generalizing makes it seem sometimes.
Click to expand...

Now you've lost me. What do you mean?
 
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