Co-Inoculating Wines
Some years ago, I was advised by a professional winemaker to use two different types of yeast when starting a blackcurrant wine. I’d never thought of trying this before, but I took the advice of the winemaker. The resulting wine was excellent!
Some suggest that yeast have little to do with the flavours of a wine, and if there is any difference when the same grape juice is fermented in two different batches, each with a different yeast strain, any difference is almost imperceptible and likely only noticeable when the wine is new.
However, a recent study by the Australian Wine Research Institute indicates that yeast are partially responsible for bringing out some of the different flavours in a wine. They experimented on juice from Sauvignon blanc grapes and inoculated different batches with a combination of yeast strains. After completion, 12 trained judges tasted the wine while thiol analysis was done in a labratory.
It was concluded that using two different strains of yeast (co-inoculation) at the beginning of the fermentation could increase flavours and aromoas of the wine.