GMO yeast and grapes a controversial subject.

Personally, I'd hate to think that all the knowledge that has been gained in the care and feeding of natural yeast strains over the past couple of decades might become nearly worthless if GMO strains come available that reduce the science of winemaking to a set of cookbook steps. Further, if strains are developed that crowd out natives, and (my principal paranoia about this kind of thing) if they have characteristics that make them fully functional only with the addition of proprietary adjunct chemicals available only to those willing to pay for access, then we will have killed free and open access to an entire industry just to pad the pockets of the creators by the few who can afford the adjuncts.

IMHO, this is not progress.

The ideological/philosophical/ethical aspects are for every one to ponder individually, of course

This being said, on a pragmatic level, while I find it interesting to envision tailor-made yeasts to emphasize some tastes during fermentation, to ferment at room temp but knock down at a low alcohol volume for sweet meads, to floculate more for easy clearing or even to get some funky effects like blue mead (let the yeast produce a colorant as byproduct) or phosphorescent mead (picture this in a night club 8) ) I would always worry that someone tries to develop a more resilient yeast, and comes up with a super bug - the kind you can't kill and that eventually ends biodiversity.

On the plus side, most yeast is used alone, in a sanitzed environment, and discarded after use so transmission risk is much lower than if an GMO chicken, rat or beef was released in the wild.

ehanuise, I have to challenge your conclusion based on personal experience. Take a look at my series of postings about my adventures with local "wild" yeast in the "out of the packet" thread I had going here a few months back. Oskaar eventually suggested that the strain of yeast I had cultivated from my property was not wild, but feral -- descended from the R-HST I'd used in an earlier batch. It was discarded, but it wasn't killed first, and that led to its propagation and eventual re-use, although unintentionally!

Yup, however this was an experiment in using wild yeasts (which proved feral), and this is not the 'usual' way

However you have a point here, especially since the average joe won't go trough the hassle of heat/UV/microwave/chemical sterilisation of the lees before discarding them. (I wouldn't, anyway :tongue3: )

Yeah, that's exactly my concern. Even if the GMO yeast were distributed only to commercial wineries, I doubt many of them have the infrastructure in place to ensure complete sterilization of spent lees. It would only be a matter of time before some of the modified strain showed up in the larger environment. Could be very bad, if a combination of "super killer factor" were included in such a strain, along with a trait that required a chemical key to successfully ferment.

It's funny you compare yeast to things like mice. I would say GM yeast are a much much larger threat to spreading through the environment than mice or even anything plant or animal. They float on the air! How do you stop the air from moving from place to place?

I'm torn on the subject of GMOs. One the one hand, we've been doing genetic modifications for thousands of years. Think cows are a result of natural selection? No one has really complained until we started calling things "genetically modified". Where were the protesters complaining about Mendel's pea plants? Ok, so that wasn't really modification you say. How about Orville Redenbacher and popcorn? He specifically selected out corn that was good for popping and now it's all over the place. Yeah but at least he didn't put E. coli in the corn.... Ok, but where do you think corn came from????

So yeah, that doesn't solve anything. I guess my point is that it's not as dangerous as the people in foil hats want to make us think it is. Yes, direcly putting bacteria genes into a plant (or vice versa) is new, but only because it short-cuts what we've done before. Might there be some unforseen side-effects? Sure. Might they turn out to be benign or even beneficial? Yes, but no one wants to admit that.

I suppose the best thing to do is let things run their course a bit more before we make any crazy decisions. That's difficult, because we can't really do experiments in isolation. Some GMO yeast will get out and live on the GMO corn and be fed to the GMO cows hopped up on rBGH. Will we all turn green? Probably not. But we should probably be a little cautious as we go, just in case.

Edit: Crap! I forgot to answer the original question!

Ok, so for the wine industry I would advise against GM yeast. Wine has never been about high-tech; where is the need for new and improved yeast? I can see how maybe the big box wineries want to squeeze every last inch out of their harvest so some super-yeast might be nice. But even that goes against the spirit of winemaking, IMO. If we're talking about making a new malaria vaccine and we need GMOs to produce the precursors, I'd probably say go for it. But there's just no overwhelming need for GM yeast in winemaking and the benefit produced would be so marginal that it all just seems like a bad idea.

First, let me say that to me GMO products have been altered in the lab, their genetic properties have been cut out, added to, or otherwise altered. I don’t consider products that are the result of selective breeding to be Genetically Modified.

Now to the question. I have two problems with the idea of GMO yeast for wine.

First, they won’t create yeast that make for better wine, that is too subjective and there is just not enough of a market on the high end for them to make the amount of money necessary to justify it. They will make yeast that ferments faster, ages faster and out competes any rival yeast or infection, with no concern when it comes to taste. The whole point will be to make cheaper, not better wine for that is where the money is. The next thing you know we will have 100 different brands of two buck chuck. Don’t get me wrong, Charles Shaw is good wine for 2 dollars, but do we really need a thousand different varieties of inexpensive wine? This lowering of the price will unfortunately eventually lead to the decline of the 15-20 dollar bottle as they will have trouble competing. There will always be a market for the best as there will always be people that can afford the 200 dollar bottles of wine, I however can’t and enjoy the great selection currently available that is in my price range.

Second, a Good friend of mine with a Phd and 5 years of post doctorial work as a Micro Biologist once told me that the thing that bothered her the most about gene splicing were the genes around the splices. When you add in a set of genes to say make a yeast work faster, you are damaging all of the genetic code around the splice. This also causes genetic mutations, however these are unplanned mutations and nobody currently tracks those. These may be anything, good, bad or indeterminate. Usually they are relatively benign, but you have no guarantee. We will never be able to contain the yeast, it will get out and spread. So what happens then when the GMO yeast that has very carefully been designed to out compete all other yeasts gets lose?

Besides, I don’t really feel like helping to make Monsanto rich each time I brew.


Cheers
Jay

AKueck said:

I'm torn on the subject of GMOs. One the one hand, we've been doing genetic modifications for thousands of years. Think cows are a result of natural selection? No one has really complained until we started calling things "genetically modified". Where were the protesters complaining about Mendel's pea plants? Ok, so that wasn't really modification you say. How about Orville Redenbacher and popcorn? He specifically selected out corn that was good for popping and now it's all over the place. Yeah but at least he didn't put E. coli in the corn.... Ok, but where do you think corn came from????

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There's an important difference between selective breeding (which CAN lead to extremes, but is still a 'natural' process, albeit nature gets diverted by man's will) and lab work at the gene level to modify (or more recently create from scratch) a living organism's DNA.
The latter method is the one that bears risks of unforeseen consequences.

From my point of view, the benefits of using GMO yeast in wine making is secondary to the debate of whether the creation of a GMO is an ethical thing to do in the first place.

Creating a genetic modicification has potential repurcussions that reach far beyond the industry doing the work. It has been pointed out already that the industry in question may be so focused on its own financial goals that it does not take measures to investigate these potential negatives. This is particularly troublesome when dealing with micro-organisms that can enter the food chain undetected and seriously contaminate our environment. Without a complete understanding of the subsequent cellular interactions between species, it is impossible for the geneticist to predict how a seemingly innocuous modification of a yeast DNA could create a pathological byproduct or offspring. It therefore seems logical that the act of creating the GMO is dangerous, unethical and should be banned worldwide.

Is this an alarmist standpoint? Perhaps. We all know that science has improved our quality of life immeasurably over the past 200 years. Science virtually wiped out Polio and may be close to finding a cure for Aids (perhaps using a GMO). But my fear is that we will unleash an unforseen monster into our world that cannot be controlled and will end up hurting more than helping.

Therefore, in light of my opinion on GMOs, it stands to reason that I do not support their use in the wine industry.

Angus

P.S. - A great article I just found on GMOs in the wine industry here.

ehanuise said:

There's an important difference between selective breeding (which CAN lead to extremes, but is still a 'natural' process, albeit nature gets diverted by man's will) and lab work at the gene level to modify (or more recently create from scratch) a living organism's DNA.
The latter method is the one that bears risks of unforeseen consequences.

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I totally agree, they are different. But truly they lie on a spectrum and are not two totally separate issues. There's more than one way to skin a cat, etc. The extremes of gene splicing are far more "out there" than anything we could do with selective breeding, but only because we can make the modifications faster. (think about dog breeding and all the crazy genetic diseases in purebreds. it sure took awhile for that to take hold but here it is, just the same.) I just think it's worth pointing out that the slope we're slipping down is nothing new; we've been doing it at least as long as we've been planting wheat and taking dogs out hunting with us. We're just "better" at it now, for good or for ill.

The danger of science has always been there. Dynamite wasn't invented to drop on people's heads during a war, it was for mining. But hey, it's good at killing people too. Is that nuclear reactor cheap energy or a way to build a bomb? Might we create a superbug that wipes us all out if we start monkeying with GMOs? Sure thing, but it's got about the same probability as total nuclear war (pretty high at first, but hopefully less so now). What it really comes down to is whether or not the people in charge of the technology have the knowledge (technical, ethical, etc) to use it correctly. Obviously, that can change a lot from place to place and time to time, but that's what we really need to keep an eye on--not that the science exists but who are we letting use it and to what ends?

Like I said earlier, GMOs are great for things like drug distillations for cheap vaccines. They might be ok for some applications where they'll come into contact with the rest of the world (oil spill cleanup?). But they're totally unnecessary in an industry like winemaking. And for all my "everything is genetically modified" ideas, I still buy organic, no GMO food whenever I can (and living near Berkeley, that's pretty easy).

The capitalized and scary acronym GMO! Even its name is scary. Genetically modified organism. Its not a thing its an organism. Its not natural is modified. Its something from a sci-fi horror movie.

It depends on what exactly is being done in the lab. If the yeast or animal is just made bigger or stronger from taking part of one yeast strain and put into another then that would happen anyway naturally. When we hear new reports about glow in the dark rabbits that had jellyfish dna spliced in thats different. Both scenarios would have to carry a GMO label no doubt from a government ruling. GMO is pretty vague. Are there specifics of what is being spliced around? I seem to be in the minority of the possible pro yeast GMO group lol.

Generally the worry is the "transgenic" variety of GMO where they take something from one animal/plant/bacteria and shove it into another. This is a little harder to envision happening "naturally" and thus the worry about "what exactly did we do?" So one way to supercharge yeast is to add genes from something else (probably bacteria) that would help it metabolize a wider variety of sugars, proteins, etc and complete fermentation faster. Other genes might help the yeast fend off competitors by producing nasty chemical that kill them (could be a yeast gene or probably another bacterium). Lots of fun things you could add. Maybe we can make them turn the wine green with some algae genes. :confused3:

Anyway that's where the worry lies. Things that don't normally breed being spliced together. Next we'll make pigs fly and the cows come home.

14 years... doh it's in the wild already :icon_cyclops:

Let me ignore the ethical issue as I covered that earlier. Instead, let's look at the implications of using this yeast on the American wine industry.

First, the yeast is special because it is able to do two steps, the fermentation and the malolactic fermentation that converts malic acid into lactic acid. The second step used to be performed by a bacteria. The question that I have seen in various articles is whether the bacteria contribute anything to the character of the wine. Will the loss of the bacteria from the process reduce the quality? Will it improve it or have no affect at all?

Second, the purpose of developing this yeast seems to have been to eliminate the unwanted bacterial byproducts that can give some 10% of the people who drink red wine a migraine. Is it really worth fiddling with nature, alienating the international market, and possibly reducing the quality of the wine just to grab that last 10% of the market? Certain countries vehemently oppose the consumption of any GMO or GMO product. Since the FDA does not require special labeling of any product created with a GMO, consumers are going to err on the side of caution and stop drinking any wine exported from the States. We could be losing more wine drinkers than we are getting.

Third, the new yeast's ability to conduct the MLF helps avoid the possibility of spoilage or a stuck MLF, which results in the loss of batches every year. I am sure the industry has been attempting to isolate a strain of yeast for years that can do what ML01 does. Once the industry realizes the benefits of single organism fermentation, they may very well embrace ML01 despite it's origins. Is the American wine industry therefore ahaed of the curve? Are we placing ourselves in a position to become the dominant wine producing country by utilizing the advancements of science before everyone else? Or will the other wine producers lambast America for creating the yeast, grab up market share as the international wine drinkers refuse to buy our wines, and then use the yeast themselves since "it is already out there"?

My gut feel is that ML01 is just not worth the headache (pardon the pun). The wine industry is not exactly hurting, and I see no reason why it needs to try something new that is so controversial. Aluminum aging tanks with oak staves is one thing, GMOs are a whole different beast.

Angus

Angus,

I am in complete agreement with you, but the genie's already out of the bottle (so to speak) with this one.

I just hope we haven't made a big mistake....

As some of you may be aware, the chinese and asian industry of winemaking is currently booming. (hell I can now find 'great wall' white and red wine at the local supermarket. Didn't try it yet, but definitely will, out of curiosity.)
I expect the controls and ethical pondering to be much less present there than in the US (not to mention europe which is way stricter in that regard).

Not that they don't care about the ethical considerations or public safety, this being said. It's just that the asian mindset cast a different light pn such items, and they have a different approach as a consequence; the best way to describe it to non asians would be 'more pragmatic'.

So we can expect to see more of these on the market soon, and maybe they already are >

Oskaar said:

And they would never adulterate honey either! *snicker* :laughing4:

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lol

with all the issues with toothpaste, toys, paint, dog food, and honey from china I sure wouldnt touch any wine.