Scientists tracked the microbes in wine grape fermentation and found that letting wild yeasts and bacteria do the work naturally, versus adding commercial yeast, mostly changes what happens in the first few days, after which both methods converge on similar chemistry by the end.
1
Fermentation stage (early, middle, late) was the biggest driver of microbial community changes, more so than whether fermentation was spontaneous or inoculated
2
Wild (spontaneous) fermentations started with more diverse fungal communities that converged slowly toward Saccharomyces dominance, while inoculated ones converged rapidly
3
At fermentation start, inoculated batches showed more stress-response and protein-metabolism gene activity, while spontaneous batches showed more sugar transport, sulfur metabolism, and aroma-compound biosynthesis; these differences faded by fermentation's end
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