Abstract
Microbiomes are integral to viticulture and winemaking – collectively termed winegrowing – where diverse fungi and bacteria can exert positive and negative effects on grape health and wine quality. Wine is a fermented natural product, and the vineyard serves as a key point of entry for quality-modulating microbiota, particularly in wine fermentations that are conducted without the addition of exogenous yeasts. Thus, the sources and persistence of wine-relevant microbiota in vineyards critically impact its quality. Site-specific variations in microbiota within and between vineyards may contribute to regional wine characteristics. This includes distinctions in microbiomes and microbiota at the strain level, which can contribute to wine flavor and aroma, supporting the role of microbes in the accepted notion of terroir as a biological phenomenon. Little is known about the factors driving microbial biodiversity within and between vineyards, or those that influence annual assembly of the fruit microbiome. Fruit is a seasonally ephemeral, yet annually recurrent product of vineyards, and as such, understanding the sources of microbiota in vineyards is critical to the assessment of whether or not microbial terroir persists with inter-annual stability, and is a key factor in regional wine character, as stable as the geographic distances between vineyards. This review examines the potential sources and vectors of microbiota within vineyards, general rules governing plant microbiome assembly, and how these factors combine to influence plant-microbe interactions relevant to winemaking.
Highlights
For thousands of years, wines have been made exclusively through autochthonous fermentations conducted by the microbiota present in and on the fruit, or resident in the fermentation vessel (Chambers and Pretorious, 2010; Marsit and Dequin, 2015)
We examine microbial ecology, reservoirs, and transmission in vineyards from the ground up in an attempt to understand if and how environment, humans, and plant hosts together drive microbial assembly and interannual stability of grapevine microbiomes
The microbial ecosystems within vineyards exert critical influences on grapevine health and wine quality, and understanding both the sources of microbiota within vineyards and effectors on community assembly is important for addressing various challenges to winegrowing
Summary
Wines have been made exclusively through autochthonous fermentations conducted by the microbiota (see Glossary) present in and on the fruit, or resident in the fermentation vessel (Chambers and Pretorious, 2010; Marsit and Dequin, 2015). Microbes are differentially dispersed due to their life-strategies and morphological features, and environmental factors shape the regional pool of microorganisms as reservoirs or through altering dispersion These include regional weather patterns that drive dispersion and deposition like wind and rain (Madden, 1997; Bokulich et al, 2014), the interaction of these weather patterns with landscape scale features (Mahaffee and Stoll, 2016), proximity to microbial point sources like other farms or roads (Bowers et al, 2011), landscape connectivity between vineyards (Meentemeyer et al, 2012), vectoring by insect hosts (Stefanini et al, 2012; Madden et al, 2017; Quan and Eisen, 2018), and the local environment, including surrounding soil, permanent compartments of perennial plants, neighboring plants, and surrounding forests (Fort et al, 2016). The changes associated with ripening, the change in the availability of substrates likely alters the microbial composition of the fruit surface
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