In the last 15 years these methods have tremendously enabled strain discrimination
emerging from plating studies on wine and facilitated a multitude of studies. Most
have examined S. cerevisiae populations in different wine settings. Schutz and
Gafner employed karyotyping to demonstrate the diversity of S. cerevisiae
strains in spontaneous wine fermentations, compared to inoculated fermentations.
The spontaneous fermentations were shown to contain several different strains of
S. cerevisiae that competed within the fermentation, while the inoculated fermentation
was dominated by the inoculated strain. Around the same time, Querol and co-workers employed the mito-RFLP approach to characterize spontaneous and inoculated fermentations and noted similar results. Many subsequent studies have since revealed a multitude of S. cerevisiae strains present in spontaneous and inoculated fermentations in various regions or oenological conditions. Interestingly S. cerevisiae strains that dominated fermentations in one year, either through inoculation or emerging indigenously, have been shown to dominate the same winery in the following year