1. Introduction
The conversion of grape must to wine is a complex biochemical
process involving interactions between yeasts and bacteria. It is
essential to understand the composition and behavior of these
microorganisms during fermentation in order to expand our understanding
of fermentation problems, to improve fermentation
control and to obtain final products with the desired organoleptic
characteristics. However, most of the analyses of microbial diversity
during wine fermentation have been based on culture-dependent
methods that relied on the isolation of colonies for further characterization.
Using culture-dependent methods, there is a high risk
of misidentification of the ecology of complex microbial ecosystems
(Amann, Ludwig, & Schleifer, 1995; Rantsiou et al., 2005).
Recently, several culture-independent methods based on the
nucleic acids have been used to analyze the microbial diversity of