Ongoing domestication of wine yeast: past, present and future

Abstract

Yeast starter cultures for winemaking have traditionally been developed from successful fermentation isolates. Over the past 10–20 years there has been a move to harness genetic techniques to improve production strains. The approaches to achieve this have been similar to those applied in the agricultural sector for crop and livestock development. Thus, domestication of wine yeasts now involves hybridisation, mutagenesis, selection and screening. There is also a growing interest in tapping into isolates of non-Saccharomyces yeasts to develop novel starter cultures that bring complexity and potentially enhance regionality of wines. This review will cover these developments and will look to the future opportunities arising from the application of genetic engineering and synthetic biology approaches for the introduction of novel phenotypes that are outside of the reach of traditional methods.