New trends on yeast autolysis and wine ageing on lees: a bibliographic review

Abstract

<p style="text-align: justify;">In enology, lees are mainly used in the traditional practice of « sur lies » wine ageing, which consists of carrying on the contact between wine and lees (yeasts and vegetal residues) during ageing. Lees come either from first or second fermentation, and could be used for white or red wines elaboration. Such an enological practice remains yet empirical. In the present paper, the state of art was investigated in order to collect and analyze most of the scientific works realized on wine lees. It includes also technological points relevant from such a practice.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">A clear definition of wine lees from legal and technological points of view was given in the first part of the present paper. A second part described the mechanisms of autolysis and focused more precisely on each class of identified autolysis products. Many scientific works had indeed revealed the yeast autolysis phenomenon occuring during such a way of wine ageing. All these works remained mainly based on identification of yeast macromolecules released in the wine during the autolysis phenomenon. However, the experimental methodologies followed by the different authors are variable, and most of the obtained results were difficult to extrapolate to actual wine ageing on lees. Only few works dealt with the physicochemical properties of such lees during autolysis, specially towards oxygen, polyphenols and other wine compounds. A compilation of recent data obtained on these peculiar topics was then given. In a third and last part, the effect of ageing wine on lees was approached from a technical point of view.</p>

Implications of nitrogen compounds during alcoholic fermentation from some grape varieties at different maturation stages and cultivation systems

“…However, in all the fermentations observed, there was an increase of amino nitrogen, assimilable nitrogen and total amino acids without proline during the second half of the fermentation (Table 3). This could be due to yeast autolysis that occurs at the end of fermentation (Dizy & Polo, 1996;Fornairon-Bonnefond, Camarasa, Moutounet, & Salmon, 2002;Moreno-Arribas & Polo, 2009) and/or due to toxic effect of ethanol (Ancín-Azpilicueta, Fraile-Jiménez de Maquirriain, Garde-Cerdán, & Torrea-Goñi, 2005;Ferreras, Iglesias, & Girbés, 1989). During the autolysis, different compounds are released into the medium as amino acids (Alexandre & Guilloux-Benatier, 2006), and the ethanol inhibits the amino acid transport systems and causing the release of these compounds into the medium.…”

Induction of Autophagy by Second-Fermentation Yeasts during Elaboration of Sparkling Wines

“…Some still wines also benefit from yeast autolysis. Indeed, "aging on lees" is becoming increasingly popular due to its positive effect on several wine properties, including the chemical stability of white wines and the color stability or mouth feel, among other properties, of red wines (14).…”

“…One premise for this hypothesis is that autophagy precedes autolysis under wine-making conditions. However, autolysis under industrial conditions is usually defined as a self-degradation process that involves disturbance of internal membrane systems and release of vacuolar hydrolases into the cytoplasm (11,14). Curiously, there are no references to autophagy in the previously published descriptions of yeast behavior during wine fermentation and aging.…”

Construction of a recombinant autolytic wine yeast strain overexpressing the csc1‐1 allele

“…[1][2][3] Nevertheless, the influence of autolysis on wine quality attributes is particularly important in the case of sparkling wines due to the special features of its production process, which includes two fermentative steps and a long period of incubation of the wine in contact with yeast. Similar to most winemaking methods, the first fermentation of sparkling wines involves the transformation of a grape must into a base wine.…”