Abstract
In alcoholic fermentation, under oenological conditions, the environmental parameters impacting fermentation kinetics and aroma production have been widely studied. The nitrogen content of grape must was found to be one of the most important parameters for both of these aspects of fermentation. Many studies have been performed on the effect of mineral nitrogen addition. However, it has increasingly been observed that the nature of the nitrogen added leads to different results. Our work focused on the effects of peptide addition on both fermentation kinetics and aroma production. Peptides are one of the less well understood sources of assimilable nitrogen, as their incorporation by yeast remains unclear. In this study, we compared the effect of the addition of a “classic” assimilable nitrogen source (ammonium + amino acids) with that of peptide addition in both white and red must fermentation by screening 18 Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains in total. Our data show that peptide addition enhances fermentation kinetics and leads to specific changes in the production of fermentative aromas. The impact of peptides on thiol synthesis is rather limited.
Highlights
Grape must is a very complex medium
We compared the effect of the addition of a “classic” assimilable nitrogen source with that of peptide addition on the main fermentation kinetics and aroma synthesis
Through the use of an innovative online monitoring system and associated automatic data treatment “pipeline”, we found that peptide addition at the beginning of wine alcoholic fermentation has an impact on the parameters of fermentation kinetics as well as the aroma profile
Summary
Grape must is a very complex medium. It is composed of numerous nutrients that are essential for the alcoholic fermentation process, such as vitamins, lipids and nitrogen [1,2,3]. Nitrogen is one of the most important of these nutrients and has been widely studied in recent decades, and its influence on the rate or duration of fermentation has been described. Nitrogen is present in different forms in must, including proteins, peptides, free amino acids and ammonium [4]. Free amino acids and ammonium are the two nitrogen sources considered to be assimilable by yeast and are the best described. Small peptides (
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