Wouldn't you think that when early man and woman learned to make wine they thought it a miracle - or at least a mystery? Picture some prehistoric person putting a bunch of grapes in a stone jar, then getting so busy hunting pterodactyls for a week or so that they forgot all about those grapes. Imagine their surprise when they finally came back to find the whole business bubbling and gurgling away with great vigor. That amazing process is called fermentation.

Fermentation is an important process in this world - and not just for making wine. Even in early times fermentation was used not only for beverages, but for cheese, for certain textile processes, for tanning leather, and, of course, for the mild and brief fermentation that yeast causes in bread.

Our industrial society has since used ferm…