Abstract
Wine originally emerged as a serendipitous mix of chemistry and biology, where microorganisms played a decisive role. From these ancient fermentations to the current monitored industrial processes, winegrowers and winemakers have been continuously changing their practices according to scientific knowledge and advances. A new enology direction is emerging and aiming to blend the complexity of spontaneous fermentations with industrial safety of monitored fermentations. In this context, wines with distinctive autochthonous peculiarities have a great acceptance among consumers, causing important economic returns. The concept of terroir, far from being a rural term, conceals a wide range of analytical parameters that are the basis of the knowledge-based enology trend. In this sense, the biological aspect of soils has been underestimated for years, when actually it contains a great microbial diversity. This soil-associated microbiota has been described as determinant, not only for the chemistry and nutritional properties of soils, but also for health, yield, and quality of the grapevine. Additionally, recent works describe the soil microbiome as the reservoir of the grapevine associated microbiota, and as a contributor to the final sensory properties of wines. To understand the crucial roles of microorganisms on the entire wine making process, we must understand their ecological niches, population dynamics, and relationships between ‘microbiome- vine health’ and ‘microbiome-wine metabolome.’ These are critical steps for designing precision enology practices. For that purpose, current metagenomic techniques are expanding from laboratories, to the food industry. This review focuses on the current knowledge about vine and wine microbiomes, with emphasis on their biological roles and the technical basis of next-generation sequencing pipelines. An overview of molecular and informatics tools is included and new directions are proposed, highlighting the importance of –omics technologies in wine research and industry.
Highlights
Wine is a product with high sociocultural interest
The objective of this review is to summarize the current knowledge about the role of microbial communities in viniculture, highlighting the contributions of Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies and identifying new scientific-industrial frontiers
Most metagenomics research in this field has focused on microbial monitoring during fermentation to obtain a detailed description of the relevant microbial populations associated with grape and must that might lead to wine spoilage, an advance highly valuable for winemaking
Summary
Wine is a product with high sociocultural interest. In particular, wines with distinctive autochthonous properties have a great demand among consumers and collectors, causing important economic consequences. Most metagenomics research in this field has focused on microbial monitoring during fermentation to obtain a detailed description of the relevant microbial populations associated with grape and must that might lead to wine spoilage, an advance highly valuable for winemaking These NGS-enabled studies reflect a wider range of bacteria, besides the commonly detected LAB and acetic acid species, able to persist in fermenting musts of various grape varieties (Bokulich et al, 2012; Piao et al, 2015; Portillo and Mas, 2016; Stefanini et al, 2016).
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