Modeling of the aromatic profile in wine-making fermentation: the backbone equations

摘要

The aromatic profile of a wine is mainly determined during the grape-must fermentation and is characterized by several compounds called flavour markers. These particular compounds are minority by-products produced from "leaks of metabolism" of the used yeast. The final objective of this work is to gain more insight about the synthesis of the aromatic profile in order to optimize it. For this purpose, a first necessary step is the development of a model representing the main physiological phenomena observed during the batch fermentation in the wine-making process in order to later extend it with flavour-markers equations. The main-kinetics model described in this paper is based on a set of biological reactions in which nitrogen compounds such as hexose transporters play a central role, in line with experimental evidence deduced from extensive experimental studies (Malherbe, 2003).