According to researchers, the alcoholic content of wine has gradually risen from 12-12.5 per cent to beyond 15 per cent in last 10-15 years.
The boost in alcohol content reduces aroma and flavour intensity of the wine, they said.
This, plus issues of public health, as well as taxes (in some countries, on alcoholic content), have created a need for approaches to lowering alcohol content, researchers said.
The new study began with a systematic screening of non-Saccharomyces yeast as a means of achieving such a reduction, said corresponding author Cristian Varela of the Australian Wine Research Institute, Adelaide, South Australia.
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They chose the most successful of these yeasts, Metschnikowia pulcherrima AWRI1149, for experiments in which it was set to work separately on Chardonnay and Shiraz musts.
Once the slower-growing Metschnikowia yeasts had consumed 50 per cent of the sugar, S cerevisiae were added to the mix to complete the process.
This "sequential inoculation" reduced the alcohol content in Shiraz from 15 per cent to 13.4 per cent (and somewhat less in Chardonnay).
Controls not inoculated with non-Saccharomyces strains did not produce reduced alcohol content, according to the report.
The research appears in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology published by American Society for Microbiology (ASM).