WAYANA, our wine house in Istanbul Kadıköy, brings more than 400 types of wine from Turkish producers to wine lovers. In addition to the wine house service, we continue to work intensively to reach wider masses of wine culture and knowledge through weekly tasting events we organize. The blogs on our website aim to raise awareness on this issue.
Imagine a single-celled factory that you can see only with a microscope. The only reason for its existence and the only condition for its existence is to eat the sugar in the grape juice and then remove the waste as alcohol after eating it. If we can sip the wine in our glasses today, we owe this honor to the bacteria with the scientific name of Saccharomyces cerevisiae; in short wine yeast in our daily conversation.
Wine yeast is a bacterium that already exists in nature and comes to life in grape skins. Oxygen-starved due to its nature, wine yeast eats the sugar in grape juice as an energy source, resulting in ethanol and carbon dioxide gas being released. In fact, this process we have described is what the science of chemistry calls fermentation.
If we extract the juice from the grapes we will buy from the market, crush them and leave this grape juice at the table, fermentation begins with the effect of the yeasts in the grape skin. The activity of wine yeast in grape juice continues until all of the sugar in the must is consumed and converted into ethanol and carbon dioxide. As a matter of fact, the wine obtained when this process is completed is called 'dry wine'. To summarize, dry wine is the wine that is obtained when the natural sugar in the grape juice, which we call must, is completely consumed by the wine yeast and there is no sugar left.
Wine yeast used in the production of the wine industry is not just natural yeast. After the scientific discovery of the working principles of yeast, yeast production was started to meet the industrial production needs. Bacteria grown massively in large sterile tanks and under special aeration conditions are then sieved, washed, dried and packaged in vacuum packaging. Let us remind you that yeast is used in many productions. Yeast is an integral part of production, not only in winemaking, but also in the production of many products such as dough and beer.
Dried yeast returns to active life within 15 minutes in warm water or diluted grape must. Generally, the fermentation starts with the addition of 2-4% yeast. After the fermentation is complete, the residues of the yeast and grapes are removed from the wine.
So this is the story of the single-celled wine production plant Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We've taken a closer look at a mysterious part of the micro world.
