A Control Alternative for the Hidden Enemy in the Wine Cellar

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a very interesting topic and a state-of-the-art review is appropriate at this point of knowledge. However the title seems to be a bit misleading. Most of the review is about antimicrobial peptides and their mode of action with relatively little work done on Brettanomyces. In particular, the authors do not present evidence that peptides are an efficient tool against this yeast under realistic wine conditions. Otherwise it seems that AMP are already well established as an alternative to sulfite or other antimicrobials.

Specific corrections

Line 11 – replace must by wine because musts are seldom highly contaminated by Brettanomyces and do not require its inactivation during fermentation, only later after alcoholic fermentation.

Figure 1 – remove this figure because it is already disseminated in many other references.

Section 3 – there is little revision of the control measures, like DMDC, chitosan, or thermal treatments. Authors may refer to several recent reviews on Brettanomyces control (e.g. wrtitten by the research groups of C. Edwards or A. Morata), where one last has been published in one MDPI jornal (Beverages, by Malfeito-Ferreira, 2018).

Line 98 and 178 – correct the font of the enzyme words and of the website.

Line 175 – correct (me parece).

Line 180 – spell AFP.

Line 196 – spell PAF.

Figure 3A – the c columns do not have te top line.

Tables 1 – too little information, remove and replace by text only.

Conclusions: - correct to Conclusions

Conclusions – authors are invited to increase the text mainly concerning by one hand the limitations found so far and by the other hand the future prospects to exploit the potential of AMP against Brettanomyces in wine. In fact, AMP’s seem to be far from an industrial application mainly because it is not easy to overcome the difficulties of peptide purification and mode of use.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We are grateful to the comments done about our manuscrip. Accordong your correction, we made a major  revision.

Thanks for your careful review.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is submitted as a review paper. Most part of the manuscript is reviewing the literature (lines 27-276) and then it alters to a research paper format reporting new data. 

In brief, the manuscript is a review or a research one? Three quarters of it are reviewing the literature and suddenly in page 6, line 258 it starts reporting new data. This is an unacceptable format.

In addition the manuscript requires very good english editing in order to become understandable to the reader.

The manuscript should be rejected and re-wrtitten either as review or with sustantianl amount of data as research paper

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

We are grateful to the comments done about our manuscript.  According your correction, we made a major revision.

Thanks for your careful review.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The review "A Control Alternative for the Hidden Enemy in the Wine Cellars" by Pena et al. is timely and should be well received by the technical fermentation community. The text is written with wine as the focus, but indeed, the information is applicable to other fermented beverages as well. The authors also supply some new data (Fig.3 and Table 1) to bolster their recently published findings (citation 51). It is unclear if Fermentation allows such non-peer reviewed data - I cannot perform an adequate review here due to the lack of a methods section - but it only accounts for a small percentage of the overall review regardless.

My main issues were: 1) it needs quite a bit of English language editing, and 2) some (ostensibly) new data are presented.  It's unclear to me if a review can include unpublished data. I believe that this manuscript is suitable for publication.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

We are grateful to the comments done about our manuscript.  According your correction, we made a major revision.

1.   Question: The review "A Control Alternative for the Hidden Enemy in the Wine Cellars" by Pena et al. is timely and should be well received by the technical fermentation community. The text is written with wine as the focus, but indeed, the information is applicable to other fermented beverages as well. The authors also supply some new data (Fig.3 and Table 1) to bolster their recently published findings (citation 51). It is unclear if Fermentation allows such non-peer reviewed data - I cannot perform an adequate review here due to the lack of a methods section - but it only accounts for a small percentage of the overall review regardless.

Response: In the new version it was corrected.

2.   Question: My main issues were: 1) it needs quite a bit of English language editing, and 2) some (ostensibly) new data are presented.  It's unclear to me if a review can include unpublished data. I believe that this manuscript is suitable for publication.

Response: In the new version it was corrected, and it was revised by a native speaker English

Thanks for your careful review.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors made the required ammendments

Reviewer 2 Report