When you taste a wine or beer that calls up the flavor of rose or honey think phenylethyl acetate; it’s a by-product of the yeast cells that turn sugar into alcohol to make wine and beer. Now, says Belgium microbiologists in a research paper, those flavors and more can be purposely developed in yeast strains using the latest gene-swapping scientific method.
The paper was published by mBio, a peer-reviewed journal of the century-old American Society for Microbiology (ASM). ASM covers a wide spectrum of individual microbiological research mainly for scientists to peruse. mBio is focused on more cutting-edge research of broader interest, and since winemaking has been a branch of microbiology ever since Louis Pasteur’s nineteenth century discovery that yeast is responsible for wine’s fermentation, the microbiology of wine is logically one of the areas for mBio to cover. READ MORE…