When broscience meets winemaking (Part 1)

According to https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Broscience, broscience is a derogatory term for misconceptions and ideas of questionable scientific credibility, passed around among laymen by word-of-mouth as if factually true.

No love lost between bromeopathy and winemaking

While broscience is most often associated with fitness and sports, biology is certainly not immune to its wiles. More specifically, a fair amount of broscience unfortunately (but also humorously so) exists about winemaking. And what better place than the internet to sniff out some oenological broscience? As a point of order, please don’t bother pointing out the irony in me using the very medium mostly used to perpetuate broscience in order to ridicule it. I’m way ahead of you.

Now that it’s been established that the internet is rife with broscience, one can only delight in the knowledge that there’s plenty of material out there ripe for parody. So let’s go!

Hybrid and GMO wine yeasts are birds of a feather and should be avoided

No, they are not! And why group these together? While GMO yeasts are taboo in oenology, I really don’t see the issue with yeast hybrids. Is the actual hybridisation act really that offensive? Or is it the mere fact that they are created in a laboratory? Well, guess what? Each one of you reading this blog right now is a hybrid between your biological mother and your biological father. Offended yet? And did you know that yeast hybridisation also occurs in nature, with no human intervention at all?

As for those thinking that things happening in microbiology laboratories are generally unsavoury, they are wrong. In my past life I worked on various yeast hybridisation projects, so I speak out of experience. There is absolutely no way you can select, develop, and ultimately offer any commercial wine yeast strain without doing an exhaustive amount of laboratory work. Otherwise put, any commercial wine yeast strain on the market right now has been subjected to a wide array of laboratory tests. Selection tests, to be precise.

Remember, isolating a yeast from some glorious and romantic-sounding vineyard doesn’t guarantee success during fermentation. The real work starts in a laboratory, where the runts of the yeast litter are identified and eliminated. This might sound brutal, but microbiologists don’t play around. In the lab.

Unique yeast enzymatic activities mean no more enzymes in red winemaking

Wrong again. Margaret Mead, controversial academic and American cultural anthropologist, famously said: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” What I’m trying to get at here is that unique does not mean special – when it comes to winemaking at least. All yeasts, just like all the other living things, have enzymatic activities. But said activities are only useful to the winemaker if the enzymes in question are produced by the yeast in sufficient quantities under winemaking conditions. Thiol and ester expression, pectinolytic activity, yeast biomass development, and ethanol formation are all examples of processes heavily governed by enzymes.

As for those avoiding enzymes during red winemaking like the plague, I have some news for you. Using a wine yeast with [insert enzyme category prefix here]-ase activity might seem like a really cool idea, especially if there are tangible and repeatable effects in terms of yield and colour extraction. But there might be a nasty surprise down the line.

Broadly speaking, all red winemaking enzymes are essentially pectinases. Not using them for whatever reason, such as thinking that a yeast will do the same job or adding an enzyme is morally objective and expensive, is a choice that might haunt you later. Each time red wine filtration issues pop up, we ask winemakers if they used an enzyme during red winemaking. The answer? I’ll give you a clue. It usually starts with ‘N’ and ends with ‘O’.

When in doubt, always go back to solid science for an answer. Like we do at Laffort.