Terry Theise and yeasts

I was browsing through some of Terry's writing in his catlogs (much of which is quite similar to the book), and came across this bit of info on Strub (Rheinhessen producer for those who do not know):

"His Riesling usually ferments from its own yeasts. Lower acid types* are often started with yeast cultures for slower**, colder fermentations, so they don't lose the little acid they have."

*Strub's estate is only about 2/3 Riesling
**intersting to see this regarding inoculated ferments in light of Eric's comments regarding quite rapid native ferments

Anyway, I wonder if Terry doesn't see it as a central issue because he has a close view of the actual choices being made, and how they fit together in the entire existence of an estate.
 
originally posted by David M. Bueker:

**intersting to see this regarding inoculated ferments in light of Eric's comments regarding quite rapid native ferments
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David,
I don't want to speak for Eric, but native ferments are not reliably rapid - I think both he and I were speaking of the extremes that we have seen, not the norm.
Best, Jim
 
I don't think anyone is claiming that all native ferments are fast, far from it, I believe, as many claim they need to inoculate to ensure the completion of fermentation and/or elevage by the time of the next harvest. It's just that they can be fast, as counterexample to the "you get problems when you don't inoculate" claim.
 
I appreciate your tact, David. He certainly makes it clear that his POV results from his immense experience, compared to which I would have no right to say anything. But his views must be, to some extent, informed by commercial interests (entirely within the bounds of intellectual honesty). It is simply impossible to be a major importer of German wine and a paladin of ambient/spontaneous fermentations, so that could be why he isn't.
 
Jim,

Didn't really think that all native ferments were so active. It was just interesting to see a reference to slower fermentation with cultured yeast.

Oswaldo,

I definitely see your point about commercial interests. Given the long struggle to put (and keep!) German Riesling on the wine drinker's map I think it is completely understandable if that happens to be part of the consideration. Terry has pushed a lot of rocks up the hill - I don't expect him to pick up each boulder along the way.
 
Per Jim's comment earlier on working in a facility shared by a large number of winemakers, I wonder if many users, bringing various admixtures of microscopic biota, create an environment that is different from the one resulting from use by only one or two winemakers, and that might tip the pro-con scales in favor of inoculation.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Per Jim's comment earlier on working in a facility shared by a large number of winemakers, I wonder if many users, bringing various admixtures of microscopic biota, create an environment that is different from the one resulting from use by only one or two winemakers, and that might tip the pro-con scales in favor of inoculation.
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Ian,
I certainly think so.
The house strain where I am is so powerful and so intolerant of all other yeasts that, if I were to let my ferments go native, the house strain would take over and kill off any natives I might have on the skins.
By inoculating, I get the population that I want quickly and in overwhelming numbers - hopefully sufficient to defeat the house strain.
As it so happens, I use an inoculant that has some 'wild' yeast strains mixed in ('wild' as in raised in a lab wild and not Sacc.). And again, although they don't last long, the population gained by inoculating is so strong that they have a chance of having an effect before either the house strain or the Sacc. inoculant can kill them.

I should say that, if I worked in a facility where I was the only one making wine, I would certainly go 'wild.' But I haven't the money to make that happen so, I adapt.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Brzme:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Theoretically, I would think, it would have to be the case that ambient yeast differs with terroir and thus is an element of terroir distinction in wines. The reason is simple. Any isolated population will differ genetically, to some extent, from other populations from which it is isolated. From this it follows that ambient yeast will contribute elements such that even flavor neutral, commmercial yeast (if there is such a thing; as a breadbaker, I doubt it, by not having those flavors, will change the expression in terroir in a wine.
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This has little to do with theory.
This is mostly intellectual speculation.

As SFJoe pointed out many times we will know for sure as soon as DNA scanning of yeasts will be widely available and cheap, so many hundred or thousand of native yeasts growers and innoculators have done the tests over several vintages and terroirs.

BTW I share your feeling but really think that it is pure speculation at this stage.
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That separate populations of the same variety vary genetically from each other is hardly speculation at this point. It is part of defining how selection works in evolution. I suppose it is theoretically possible that yeast populations don't vary, but it would be just short of a miracle of the lord. It is more possible that no such variations affect the taste of wine, but it would be more speculation to guess on this possibility than not given the wide range of likely variations.
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
originally posted by nigel groundwater:

However if winery-resident yeasts [or, even more radically, yeasts brought in on the grapes in the ferment itself] could be shown to have derived originally from the vineyards feeding the winery the idea of terroir becomes more plausible.
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However, in the case I site, the grapes come from four different counties, a myriad number of vineyards, are of many different varieties and many people in the winery use commercial yeasts which can ferment at extraordinary speeds and alcohol levels - and many of these are identified as 'killers' by their manufacturers.
Hence, the house strain where I work is more likely the most potent of the Sacc. yeasts used in the facility.

An un-inoculated pinot noir that goes dry in three days when starting at 25 brix and sitting in the cold room is, I think, unlikely to be 'native' by any stretch of that definition.
Unless the 'natives' are restless . . .
Best, Jim
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Yes. Word definitions are clearly important in these discussion and your last sentence is what I was implying in my attempt at interpreting your original statement - that a winery used by multiple winemakers with different grapes from all over the place and with significant inputs of commercial yeasts is likely to be reflective [in yeast terms] of the dominant strain/s which would presumably be, or at least include, the commercial yeasts.

As a result there could be a dominant winery yeast monster which might be described as local or even ambient i.e. to the winery but local/ambient in that definition would be different from yeasts described as wild or terroir specific even if such is finally accepted as a reality with a consistent definition in terms of the place the grapes came from, the grapes themselves and the active microbials including yeasts in the ferment.

Most of the many arguments I have read about terroir have not included the last of those three aspects.

OTOH a winemaker seeking a consistent 'natural' ferment, particularly someone who includes yeast in his/her definition of terroir, could not be using such a shared facility since, as you say, the likelihood of a ferment based on his/her local wild yeasts and other microbials [plural, since it would include much more than the local Saccharomyces.cerevisiae] would, to use your words, be unlikely to be 'native' by any stretch of that definition.

While yeasts prepared from local strains are surely closer to wild/local fermentation than using commercial/international yeasts, the degree would presumably depend on the extent [if at all] to which the must is sterilised prior to their use. In other words is the ferment left wild to start without significant SO2 additions and the local culture added later to ensure a good strong ferment or is the must flattened by SO2 and then inoculated with the local pre-prepared culture? I have no idea whether the former ever happens but if it did I suppose it would be another step closer to a local, spontaneous ferment.

As I was about to post this I saw from your last post that you use a mixed non-Saccharomyces/Saccharomyces inoculation to seek diversity and a more natural order to your ferments as well as seeking to beat the winery-resident yeasts to the punch. May I ask you whether and how you would know your success rate in determining the ferment in that way? Obviously if you have some aroma/taste insights they would be interesting however you wished to qualify them.

It would be interesting to hear from participants in this thread, particularly the winemakers, where they stand on the question of the role of winery-resident yeasts, whether these can be reflective, in the absence of commercial yeasts, of the vineyards feeding the winery, whether they inevitably dominate the fermentation or whether yeasts brought in from the vineyards including those on the grapes can be the major actors in the fermentation they are seeking.

Whether the winery-resident yeasts or yeasts that come in on the grapes or some balance of both provide a spontaneous ferment might be argued over but the 'history' of active yeasts in the winery and their resulting presence could be a significant factor in how the wine turns out. Indeed they would seem necessary for a terroir differential concept of yeast to hold up.

OTOH for those who believe that natural/local/wild yeast/s is/are not a major terroir determinant i.e. a definition of terroir exists without wild, spontaneous, un-inoculated fermentation it might be argued that the evolving and more random constituents of natural ferments might actually detract from a consistent presentation of the terroir of, say, Chambolle Musigny i.e. a more consistently recognisable Chambolle character might be more obtainable from the sort of yeast package used e.g. by Jim.

This was mooted in Jamie Goodes article in issue 29 WoFW but will presumably be confronted as further research is conducted into the expanding study of yeasts and their impact on aroma and flavour.
 
Cute little critters. This from 1941. Two wines, six yeasts each.

(RENAUD Jean. Les levures des vins du val de Loire : Recherches morphologiques, biologiques et cytologiques)

levures2b.jpg
 
originally posted by Florida Jim:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Per Jim's comment earlier on working in a facility shared by a large number of winemakers, I wonder if many users, bringing various admixtures of microscopic biota, create an environment that is different from the one resulting from use by only one or two winemakers, and that might tip the pro-con scales in favor of inoculation.
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Ian

I certainly think so.
The house strain where I am is so powerful and so intolerant of all other yeasts that, if I were to let my ferments go native, the house strain would take over and kill off any natives I might have on the skins.
By inoculating, I get the population that I want quickly and in overwhelming numbers - hopefully sufficient to defeat the house strain.
As it so happens, I use an inoculant that has some 'wild' yeast strains mixed in ('wild' as in raised in a lab wild and not Sacc.). And again, although they don't last long, the population gained by inoculating is so strong that they have a chance of having an effect before either the house strain or the Sacc. inoculant can kill them.

I should say that, if I worked in a facility where I was the only one making wine, I would certainly go 'wild.' But I haven't the money to make that happen so, I adapt.
Best, Jim
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It's strictly conjecture, but you could easily imagine that bringing together strain samples from a number of different sources, somewhat geographically dispersed, would rev up competitive pressure for among the yeasts for the available food, leading to selection for those individuals with the fastest reproduction rate, which should lead to prevalence of strains with fast metabolisms. This pattern would fit with the rapid fermentation rate you describe. Frequent re-introduction of new yeast samples by the different wine makers would tend to keep the inter-strain competitive pressure at a simmer, and prevent the population from settling into an equilibrium configuration, where one or two strains come to dominate, when the system could relax metabolically, so to speak, and begin to select for other characteristics.

Actually, the winery facility might be a good setting in which to test some theoretical ecosystem equilibrium ideas.

Blah, blah, blah. Sorry to ramble on; this kind of thing is what I'm studying now, as it happens, though not at microscopic scale.
 
originally posted by nigel groundwater:

As I was about to post this I saw from your last post that you use a mixed non-Saccharomyces/Saccharomyces inoculation to seek diversity and a more natural order to your ferments as well as seeking to beat the winery-resident yeasts to the punch. May I ask you whether and how you would know your success rate in determining the ferment in that way? Obviously if you have some aroma/taste insights they would be interesting however you wished to qualify them.
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Nigel,
It is too early for me to tell.
This is my fourth year of making wine commercially and so the sample group is quite small.
Moreover, the vintages have been so different in terms of weather, vineyards sourced from and pick dates, that any quantifiable difference in aromas or flavors would be hard to trace to its source.
I expect this will change moving forward as comparable vintages occur, I have more wine-making history and I lock-up vineyard sources.

I look forward to the day that, like Eric, I can look back on 12 vintages and make some sort of generalizations about the process.
Best, Jim
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Sweet Don; they look like tiny lichens.
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Not unreasonable since lichens are composite organisms that include a fungus, which yeast are also classed as.

Mark Lipton
 
Yes; the fungi capture aglae and set up small markets in water-carbohydrate exchange, as I understand it. But it's striking to see such similar forms on both the micro-and macro-scale.

Paging doctor Thomas! Paging Dr. Thomas!
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Yes; the fungi capture aglae and set up small markets in water-carbohydrate exchange, as I understand it. But it's striking to see such similar forms on both the micro-and macro-scale.

Paging doctor Thomas! Paging Dr. Thomas!
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As I understand it, the fungi recruit a photosynthetic organism for symbiotic purposes. You may be saying essentially the same thing, but I can't be sure.

Mark Lipton
(I'll bet Yixin has been transported to new levels of ecstasy with this exchange)
 
This is a great discussion, actually. Thanks to all involved.

After a lot of navel-searching, I don't think I can consider yeast to be part of my definition of a site's terroir. I've written about this elsewhere and at length, but it seems relevant here.

1) It's not provably stable. Not all terroir effects are stable over a long enough time (erosion happens, beasties in the soil change the composition, the roots themselves change the way the soil interacts with water...which is an interesting process wherein the only thing that's actually expressing the terroir is participating in its modification, or if you prefer a more dramatic word, its destruction), but I think all or almost all of them are stable over the short term. Since I use a definition of terroir that doesn't require provable external recognition, I don't need this to be true, but I think it is. Moreover, even aside from my definition of terroir, I know of no one -- though there's always someone, I suppose -- who thinks of terroir as being something identifiably different from year to year.

But yeasts aren't stable, necessarily. In a sufficiently isolated geography, both in the vineyard and in the winery (and, one supposes, between them), maybe they are. But with neighboring vineyards subject to untold chemical degradations (or none at all), and creatures crawling/flying around while providing free transport for all and sundry microbial passengers, and wineries down the road in all directions with their gates flung wide, and people tramping in and out on their Ischian Wine Route itineraries, the introduction of unpredictably new yeasts to the ferment seems inevitable. Now, maybe this doesn't matter and when we can check the ID of each cell as it enters the winery door, we'll find that populations are stable and resistant to change. But since there are what FJ calls "killer" yeasts, brutish and bullying of their less aggressive cousins, I doubt it.

2) If yeast is part of terroir, why not other external agents? Glassy-winged sharpshooters. Phylloxera lice. Grape-chomping flocks of migratory birds. The people who, despite AdV's pleas, sneak into Romane-Conti and yank grapes off the vines. They all, to one extent or another -- some major, some minor -- affect the wine that results.

The conclusion I came to -- and my struggle was with whether or not botrytis was part of terroir, but it applies here -- is that it's the potential for such external agents that is part of a site's terroir (that is, the predilection of a site to be botrytis-affected, or proximity to water that allows the sharpshooters, or sand that resists the louse) rather than the agents themselves, and for the same reason as the first part: one is a stable effect, the other is not. One vintage might have botrytis, another not, so which is the site's character? One vintage might be devastated by pests, another not, and which is the terroir? I don't think either is, and I don't think yeasts are part of the terroir either.

It's far from a perfect line...if I throw a net over my vineyard so the birds can't dine, have I changed the terroir? I've certainly changed the site's predilection, in the way I'm using the word above...but it's close to what I want out of the concept.

3) For me, and I've already been through this a bit when Eric and I were disagreeing about the word, terroir is the effect a site has on a plant. Yeast does not, unless there's widespread cracking and fermentation starts in the vineyard (in which case there really is a "natural" wine, though there's still the tricky issue of the container), have an effect on the plant, it has an effect on the wine. That's a crucial difference, for me.

That's why, despite frequent slip-ups, I think VLM's right about the importance of using "spontaneous" and its variants over "wild" and its brethren and prefer to restrict myself to the former.
 
originally posted by Thor:
After a lot of navel-searching, I don't think I can consider yeast to be part of my definition of a site's terroir. (...) Yeast does not, unless there's widespread cracking and fermentation starts in the vineyard, have an effect on the plant, it has an effect on the wine.
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That has perfect internal consistency and, if one defines terroir that way, yeasts would certainly have to be excluded. But as consumers, we ultimately care about terroir only insofar as it manifests itself in the wine, not in the plant or fruit. The DOC/AOC authorities are hardly enlightened, but if they defined terroir as the effect on plant, grapes picked in a Barolo vineyard could be vinified in a New Zealand cellar with Kiwi yeasts and still be called Barolo because the terroir is preserved. I prefer a definition that includes the impact of a specific location's microcelular life (field and cellar) on the fermentation of the wine.
 
But as consumers, we ultimately care about terroir only insofar as it manifests itself in the wine, not in the plant or fruit.
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Actually, this is precisely where I took issue before, and will again. I believe terroir exists (because it must...a plant must be responsive to its growing conditions, it can't help but be) whether or not we can identify the manifestation.

Now, you specify that identification is the part we care about. That may be, and it's undoubtedly true for some people, but here's a hypothetical for you: does a non-wine drinking grape farmer care about terroir? I'd suggest that she does. She has to, because the way the site affects her crop determines her livelihood. But clearly she does not care about the manifestation of the terroir in the wine, because she doesn't drink it. She cares about its manifestation in the plant, full stop. Since that's the only point at which terroir actually affects the weather/soil/vine/grape/wine/consumer cycle, I'd also suggest that it's the one that matters more than any other.

That there's a whole separate category of interest in terroir, whether the INAO's puzzlings or the parlor game of "guess the site" we all play to generalized failure and occasional successes, is fun and part of what makes terroir-expressive wines enjoyable. But it's only an ancillary effect. Terroir is manifested in the plant, whether you or I care about it or not.

The DOC/AOC authorities are hardly enlightened, but if they defined terroir as the effect on plant, grapes picked in a Barolo vineyard could be vinified in a New Zealand cellar with Kiwi yeasts and still be called Barolo because the terroir is preserved.
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No, that's not correct. They could define the appellation as being that, or anything else, but they don't define the terroir, they just (in some cases, not in others) attempt to identify it. The borders, the composition laws, the min/max alcohol laws, the modification laws...they're all arbitrary.

But really, this is done anyway. You've talked about native-to-the-vineyard yeasts being an important terroir element, but few wineries exist entirely within the only vineyard that supplies their grapes, and even fewer vinify from just one site. No one, to my knowledge, has an entirely separate facility for each site's wine, existing within that site and only vinifying wines from that site. (At this point, I bet someone is going to tell me about one.) In every defined appellation of which you can think, the majority of grapes are vinified outside the terroir, and thus influenced -- at least in part -- by yeasts from other terroirs, yeasts native to the winery rather than the vineyard, or yeasts non-native to either.

But how is your case all that different from what Duboeuf used to do, or what any number of ngociants/producers do now? His wines all carried their respective appellations, but only one of the many could actually have come from vines even close to his winemaking facility, and he used an aggressive yeast that is now well-known as the cherished aroma-enhancer of industrial Marlborough sauvignon blanc. There are some pretty well-known Rhne producers, both inoculate-users and spontaneous-advocates, who farm and/or buy grapes from a pretty vast geographical area and bring the wines to a single facility. Is the difference between two hours and twelve important to the yeasts? Certainly not if you're inoculating, but I can't see how it would be even if you're not. Do the yeasts die? Are the winemaking facilities free of yeast populations of their own?
 
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