(CDN) - It appears that the major factor of a wine’s terroir has more to with the soil microbes found around the plant’s roots than with the actual soil characteristics. New research published in the mBio open-access Journal of the American Society for Microbiology could have a long-standing impact on how those in the wine business think about soil and its effects on terroir.

The findings have helped dissect how microbes affect a wine’s properties and could help advance biotech in producing hardier crops and find new bacterial ways to help wineries influence even more a wine’s final outcome.

Gilles Martin, one of the team’s researchers, looked at four related Merlot plants, growing in five different vineyards which spanned a stretch on the North Fork of Long Island. He and the team sampled the soil, leaves, flowers, grapes and roots at each of the four locations through an entire growing season. They then used shotgun metagenomics sequencing to characterize the bacterial species found on each part of the grapevines.

“Growers have been sub-selecting the best regions to grow grapes over thousands of years, but the science of that is poorly understood,” says Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. “Just the same as the human biome plays a role in health, bacteria have intricate associations with plants that affect disease resistance, stress tolerance and productivity.”