Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/137110
W I A V IM A K I N N N NE G T OG None of this is as deeply soul-satisfying as curling up with one of Gerald Asher's wine travelogues, but it's not mere academic puffery, either: These techniques are bound to make their way to a winery or service lab near you in the near future. Microbial ecology Bacterial community structure determined by sequencing of the V4 (Panels A,B) and V5 (Panels C,D) domain of 16S rRNA. 2 One of the intriguing results of the Mills lab PCRapalooza is the large amount of unidentified stuff found in many of the samples tested, DNA snippets that don't match anything in the databases. Sure, there are lots of familiar yeasts and bacteria in the printouts, but substantial numbers of mystery organisms as well, for which maybe only the family or phylum can identified. My first thought was: Maybe we're back in the pre-Pasteur days; there's some crucial organism in fermentation stews that makes wine come out the way it does and that we know nothing about. No, says Mills, most of these trace microbes aren't likely to be important; we could, for example, be finding some incidental digestive bacteria from the guts of a stray fruit fly that went through the crusher. Beneath the mystery DNA is the fact that we are accumulating PCR runs faster than we are identifying pure isolates: "We've cultured maybe 0.0001% of what's out there." Sometimes, however, DNA profiling finds something we do know about but don't associate with wine fermentations. In Bokulich's analysis of organisms found in a botrytized Dolce dessert wine fermentation (the source of the DNA graph earlier in this story), he came across two species of Sphingomonas (Alphaproteobacteria), bacteria found in lots of places in nature but never before in a wine cellar, and was able to isolate and culture them. Chances are these strains have little 5/13/10 9:25 AM Page 1 SpecTrellising_July10.qxp to do with how Dolce tastes, but finding them is further evidence that the microbial ecosystems ® 707-938-1300 info@acrolon.com Win es & V i n es JU NE 20 13 73