Paper short abstract:

For terroir vintners, microbes are seen as authors of the wine quality and require care and respect. For their challengers, they are simple operators of a biological process. Is it possible to deal with these two opposite views on the standing of the living beings we call “microbes”?

Paper long abstract:

Without raising sanitary issues, bacteria and yeasts play nevertheless a decisive role in the wine flavour. However, like all microbes they live in complex multiracial and poorly understood collectives, therefore difficult to work with: a winemaker can hardly anticipate the final quality of the wine he is making. A solution consists in pitching the wine with selected yeasts. A massive addition of yeasts prevents the development of other strains and make the fermentation more deterministic. Selected yeasts can even help to better fit the demands with its changing tastes and requirements, by bringing about particular flavours in the wine.

This commonplace understanding of markets management is challenged by a vintners who denunciate this artifice which denatures the wines quality. According to them, wines have to be the true expression of their terroir and the product of the indigenous microbes. Resorting to indigenous, wild yeasts and microbes is therefore compulsory to achieve a true terroir quality reflecting the diversity of nature.

The coexistence of these two understandings of wine quality faces a big issue within the AOP management. The highly diversified and unpredictable production of the terroir vintners is accused by their challengers to mislay the consumer. On the contrary the standardisation induced by yeast pitching is charged with boring him and leading to exaggerated competition and price collapse. These two interpretations of quality are equally acceptable; and the main challenge for the AOP today is to help these two antinomic ways of winemaking to cohabit.