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Custom nutrition for specific wine yeasts in Sauvignon blanc
In an increasingly competitive market, optimizing the quality of wines, especially the sensory properties,
is a major challenge for winemakers. Wine aroma is one of the principal attributes determining
wine consumers’ preferences.
The importance of nutrients such as nitrogen or lipids in alcoholic fermentation is well known in the
wine industry. Indeed, to assure a complete fermentation with a regular kinetic, winemakers have to
ensure that musts have adequate nutritional, physical, and chemical conditions for optimum yeast
development.
More recently, lipid content, temperature, as well as nitrogen and other micronutrients have been
shown to have a great impact on a large number of flavour compounds biosynthesized by wine
yeast during alcoholic fermentation.
The interactions between nitrogen and other key nutrients such as lipids and vitamins and their
influences on yeast viability and yeast fermentative capacities will be explain in the first part of this
article. The second part will aim at demonstrating the importance of nutrients and micronutrients
in yeast aroma metabolism as well as yeast’s ability to synthesize aromas and especially to reveal
varietal aromas in Sauvignon Blanc winemaking.
Published Mar 4, 2020