Sleeping Beauty Yeast
In June 2008 some wine experts met at Lake Zurich to taste wines made from the Räuschling white grape variety over the past 113 years.
The evening was also attended by Professor Dr. Jürg Gafner from the Agroscope-Changins Wädenswil Research Institute. The wines were then subjected to microbiological and physiological tests, and to everyone's surprise the precious living Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast strains (six different yeast strains from three years: three 1895, two 1935 and one 1962) were found and awakened from their slumber (the technical term is dormancy). This yeast in dried form comes from a 1895 vintage bottle, thus the oldest of all the wines tasted.