Yeast to enhance wine safety and healthiness (intervento orale)

Today, the consumer is extremely health mindful and searches for foods and beverages having helpful biological properties, such as high contents in antioxidant substances and low content in toxic compounds. Scientific research in the last years has proposed a lot of way to enhance safety and healthiness of wines, demonstrating that various factors may positively influence them. For example, notable correlations between yeast used for winemaking and phenolic compounds in wine were reported, demonstrating that strain behaviour can somewhat modify chromatic properties, phenolic profile and antioxidant power of wine. The present contribution aims to stress the role of the microbial starter selection in this perspective, paying also attention to the new genomic strategies helpful to improve specific traits of the selected microbial starters. The final target is the production of wines exhibiting high levels of healthy compounds, for example resveratrol, and low levels of toxic compounds, such as sulphur dioxide, acetaldehyde, methanol, ethyl carbamate, biogenic amines, medium-chain fatty acids, ochratoxin A, pesticides, fungicides, and heavy metals.ReferencesCaridi A, Sidari R - Safety and healthiness enhancement of red wines by selected microbial starters. In: Red Wine and Health, Editor: Paul O. Byrne, Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 7, 205-233, 2009.