Native yeast expert Sydney Rogers explains it all at Unfiltered Wine Festival panel in Berkeley.
Native Yeasts | Not So Pure After All?
What about native yeasts–another hallmark of the natural wine movement but one that winemakers who don’t call themselves natural frequently use?
Things are getting ever more complex on that front, as Opus One’s Sydney Rogers reported at the Unfiltered Wine Festival held in Berkeley July 26.
She researched natural fermentation during her education at U.C. Davis and was asked to speak about her findings on a panel about natural versus conventional wine.
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She isolated yeasts on Pinot Noir grapes from four different California AVAs across multiple vintages, and then made wine with them.
“We were trying to see if they could compare to commercial strains,” she said. “But the interesting part that I found from the project is that there are genetic signatures of vineyards, so yeasts can have terroir. They can be found in one vineyard across multiple years.”
Her study turned up somewhat perplexing results about what can be considered native yeast.
“I think that the term native yeast is hard because what do you consider native yeast? Do you consider it just something that’s not bought from a store, or do you consider it something that is truly genetically native to the place?”
Surprise: Bicontinental Yeast?
“We found that there’s actually a yeast that has a genetic admixture of lineages from California oak trees combined with European wine strains,” she said.
“So they sexually reproduced, and they created a new hybridized yeast strain that has characteristics of both. And I think that that’s a really interesting.
“They actually outcompeted even the strongest of fermenters like EC-1118 [a popular active dried wine yeast strain (Saccharomyces cerevisiae var. bayanus) originally isolated in Champagne] in these spontaneous ferments.
“That just shows that sometimes you have to take something of the traditional ways from the European lineage of yeast, and something from the new way or the new place that you’re trying to make wine from, and this combination of both things can end up with something really strong.”
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There was a lot of enthusiasm in the crowd when it was time to sample the 2018 Opus One, a $400+ classic from Napa Valley.
To illustrate yet again the promiscuity of yeasts, Davis said, “Jared and I had a conversation last week, and there was a brewery near [a winery], and they were curious to know what their yeast in the wine was. Turned out to be Trumer Pils yeast, so a lot of their wines were being fed with yeast.”
Said Rogers, ‘We actually looked at the populations of many of these different yeasts, and there were many that were commercial…but some of these strains that have genes from oak yeast that are native to California seem to be better suited for the environment here, because they can outcompete the other ones. Now it may not happen in every winery. I don’t know. I guess the Trumer Pils yeast could be just really going into beast mode.”
But knowing what yeast ends up in your wine is not cheap to find out.
“It’s really costly to analyze what yeast you have in your wine, right?” she said.
Rogers, who brought the all important 2018 Opus One wine the audience was excited to try, said that Opus One transitioned to native yeast.
“We used to use commercial, and winemaker [emeritus] Michael Silacci wanted to start doing native, but he felt it can be risky, especially for a wine like Opus One [a coveted $400 Napa Valley classic co-owned with a Bordeaux partner].
Serving up the 2018 Opus One. Rogers is in the background.
“So we isolated some native strains from our vineyards. And from each of our estates, we have a strain, or more than one strain, that comes from those vineyards. They’ve been compared to many databases of commercial yeast, and they are native.
“So my job is to scale them up from petri dishes to 100 liter biofermenters every day, and use those biofermenters for yeast to inoculate tanks. So it’s a native strain, but we inoculate with it,” she said.
While for years, natural winemakers have debated pros and cons of various winemaking approaches, Rogers said it was best to sidestep all the analyzing, if audiences are not interested in natural wine minutiae.
“What does your consumer care about? What does your audience care about? If they really care about natural wine and how you define how you make natural wine, then sure, talk your ear off about it.”
“I think we need to stop making people feel bad for not knowing the rules or not knowing the definitions, and just get people excited about drinking something new–especially the younger generations–because wine is so intimidating and it’s really hard to learn.”
“I think being supportive–like [answering questions] ‘why do you call it natural?’ ‘Oh, but someone else calls it natural, but they don’t do what you do,’ and then just explaining nicely why,” she said.
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