How many times have you seen or heard this in the last few years and asked what does it mean?  Is the yeast running around in the National Park out the back of the winery?

Yeast is the little bug that converts sugar in grape juice to alcohol, making that wondrous stuff wine! The same little bugger makes bread rise and beer sparkle. These little organisms have grown up in all sorts of wine regions and over the years different strains of them have been isolated to produce different results for the winemaker. Wine makers can buy a neutral yeast from the supplier to produce a wine that has no flavour from the yeast and only gives you the flavour derived from the grape. Alternatively they can ask for an aromatic yeast that gives a flavour like passionfruit to the wine. You will often see this in young commercial white wine.

So wild yeast is none or maybe even all of these. Wild yeast is the colony of yeast that lives in the vineyard where the grapes are grown and winery where it is made into wine. It may be that the winemaker introduced these yeast strains, before he decided to go wild. It may be that they were there all the time. There may be a bakery down the road or even a brewery. All these will influence the “ambient” yeast population. To make a wild yeast fermented wine the winemaker simply lets the yeast already on the grapes when they are harvested do the job instead of killing them all off and introducing another yeast. Some winemakers swear by them and others will not allow a wild ferment anywhere near the winery. You make up your own mind by asking and trying some of each.