The Antarctic yeast Candida sake: Understanding cold metabolism impact on wine

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Current winemaking trends include low-temperature fermentations and using non-Saccharomyces yeasts as the most promising tools to produce lower alcohol and increased aromatic complexity wines. Here we explored the oenological attributes of a C. sake strain, H14Cs, isolated in the sub-Antarctic region. As expected, the cold sea water yeast strain showed greater cold growth, Na+-toxicity resistance and freeze tolerance than the S. cerevisiae QA23 strain, which we used as a commercial wine yeast control. C. sake H14Cs was found to be more sensitive to ethanol. The fermentation trials of low-sugar content must demonstrated that C. sake H14Cs allowed the cold-induced lag phase of growth to be eliminated and also notably reduced the ethanol (− 30%) and glycerol (− 50%) content in wine. Instead C. sake produced sorbitol as a compatible osmolyte. Finally, the inspection of the main wine volatile compounds revealed that C. sake produced more higher alcohols than S. cerevisi