As advances in molecular methods improve it is clear that the ability to discriminate
specific strains, as well as to define their impact on wine production, will improve.
One advance that is readily accessible, and decreasing in cost, is the use of high
throughput QPCR assays. As this technology becomes more accessible and moves
into the average winery laboratory, the ability to rapidly profile and enumerate the
microbial contents of winery fermentations could become a normal part of winemaking.
With such information in hand winemakers could more readily (and
rapidly) spot problem microbes, or even problem alleles, within their fermentations.
If such data were collected in a winery each year, winemakers could look to historical
data on the previous year’s fermentations to help investigate specific anomalies.
From a more academic perspective the high throughput QPCR assays are ideal for
doing “epidemiological” surveys to identify the reservoirs of spoilage microbes
such as Br. bruxellensis, or even problem alleles, such as histidine decarboxylases
from LAB. The latter approach is currently underway in several laboratories and
will provide insight into the ecological reservoirs of genes associated with specific
wine taints.