(Forbes) - Forget sniffing the air on your next visit to a wine cellar. Stay quiet and listen. That sound you hear is the promiscuous ecstasy of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (wine yeast) engaging in free love .

Scientists have known for some time that the yeast species responsible for bread and alcohol proliferate during fermentation mainly by what they call asexual budding, a form of punching out an identical offspring by duplicating its parent’s genetic makeup. Then, in 2012, Stanford University School of Medicine researchers reported they had found it difficult to trace the lineage of both natural wild and commercial yeast strains because the little organisms had been indulging amorously in the vats, probably for hundreds of years.

Now, scientists at the Australian Wine Research Institute working in genome sequencing support that S. cerevisiae has been guilty of sexual activity and they have been keeping it all in the family—the yeasts are inbreeding.

Genetics is a complicated subject and I certainly make no attempt to unravel it in this column. Also, although S. cerevisiae is the predominant wine yeast, it is not the only species or subspecies of yeast that runs wild. If you want to know more about that, read this. 

There are wild yeasts and there are commercial yeasts. According to the genome scientists in Australia, whether wild or commercially bred, the 212 strains of S. cerevisiae they studied were genetically indistinguishable.