Dimitris Anagnostopoulos

By Dimitrios Anagnostopoulos, Despina Bozoudi and Dimitrios Tsaltas

The table olive is considered to be a traditional fermented vegetable in the Mediterranean countries and its production and consumption is recently spreading all around the world. The presence of yeasts is very important during olive fermentation due to their double role. On one hand, yeasts maintain desirable biochemical activities (lipase, esterase, β-glucosidase, catalase, production of killer factors, etc.) with essential technological applications in this fermented vegetable. On the other hand, spoilage activity may be shown. However, recent studies have reported that yeasts coming from table olives would be a new source of potential probiotics. Indeed, many yeast species found in table olive processing, have been reported to demonstrate such properties. Thus, starter cultures technology will play significant role, not only in olive fermentation by controlling the safety and the quality of the final product, but also in consumer’s health.

Part of the book: Yeast

By Dimitrios A. Anagnostopoulos, Eleni Kamilari and Dimitrios Tsaltas

Wine is the alcoholic beverage which is the product of alcoholic fermentation, usually, of fresh grape must. Grape microbiome is the source of a vastly diverse pool of filamentous fungi, yeast, and bacteria, the combination of which plays a crucial role for the quality of the final product of any grape must fermentation. In recent times, the significance of this pool of microorganisms has been acknowledged by several studies analyzing the microbial ecology of grape berries of different geographical origins, cultural practices, grape varieties, and climatic conditions. Furthermore, the microbial evolution of must during fermentation process has been overstudied. The combination of the microbial evolution along with metabolic and sensorial characterizations of the produced wines could lead to the suggestion of the microbial terroir. These aspects are today leading to open a new horizon for products such as wines, especially in the case of PDO-PGI products. The aims of this review is to describe (a) how the microbiome communities are dynamically differentiated during the process of fermentation from grape to ready-to-drink wine, in order to finalize each wine’s unique sensorial characteristics, and (b) whether the microbiome could be used as a fingerprinting tool for geographical indication, based on high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies. Nowadays, it has been strongly indicated that microbiome analysis of grapes and fermenting musts using next-generation sequencing (NGS) could open a new horizon for wine, in the case of protected designation of origin (PDO) and protected geographical indication (PGI) determination.

Part of the book: Advances in Grape and Wine Biotechnology