Page 76 - The Hunt - Winter 2023/24

FOOD & DRINK
to make. “That’s a good starting place for beginners,” he says, adding that mead is made from honey and is the trickiest and most expensive to produce. “Many people who make wine in their basements have some experience, coming from families whose relatives came here from winemaking countries.”
Before he opened his winery almost
25 years ago, Vietri got his start in the family basement with his uncle. Winemakers, Vietri points out, can use a variety of yeasts for various purposes. Yeasts will ferment at different speeds. Some give certain flavors
to the wine. Others can survive alcohol levels above 15% and the high temperatures produced by fermentation.
While many winemakers don’t use commercial yeasts, some yeasts may linger from vintage to vintage, growing in the winery if they were utilized in prior harvests. Crushed grapes will ferment on their own with no intervention, set off by ambient yeasts coming from the grapes themselves or other sources. “The positives of making wine with indigenous yeasts are, first, to say that you can do it,” Vietri says, “Done successfully,
you can get complex aromas and flavors.
The negative is that every fermentation
using natural yeasts is different. You can also get unwanted microbes that give you ‘off ’ flavors, particularly if it’s too warm before fermentation. And wild yeasts die off quicker during fermentation.”
Which leads us back to the kitchen and that sourdough bread. “Sourdough uses wild, ambient yeast and bacteria in the air that’s
a symbiotic relationship between the two,” says Weymiller.
A sourdough starter is made by combining flour and water over a period of a week or so while it picks up bacteria and yeast from the air and begins activity. “It also incorporates any yeast or bacteria on the flour as it’s fed and regenerated, growing and developing,” Weymiller says. “Some people want to romanticize the starter—how old it is, where it comes from. All that is lost when you add it to the flour.”
For those making yeast bread at home, “the flavors can get more complex if you let it ferment in the refrigerator overnight and finish it the following day,” says Weymiller.
It’s also worth addressing all the buzz surrounding fermentation and probiotics— those live microorganisms intended to
have health benefits when we take them
into our bodies. To that end, the National Institutes of Health cites a 2016 research article published in Frontiers of Microbiology: “The health benefits of some global fermented foods are synthesis of nutrients, prevention of cardiovascular disease, prevention of cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, allergic reactions and diabetes, among others.”
Katz traveled the world learning about dozens of fermented foods, from porridge (England) to palm wine (Niger and Burma) to pulque (Mexico). “Specific fermentation traditions vary from place to place, but
the foundations are the same everywhere: People ferment what is abundant, and they generally rely upon organisms that are naturally present on those foods or nearby,” he says in his book.
Finally, if all of this bubbling might seem to be a lot to digest, just remember that digestion is a natural fermentation process in itself. TH
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74 THE HUNT MAGAZINE winter 2023-24