Teodora Emilia Coldea

1 INTRODUCTION Food fermentation is the second most commonly used food processing method after heat treatment (Mukherjee et al., 2022). One third of the food consumed worldwide is represented by fermented products (Csatlos et al., 2023; Mukherjee et al., 2022), containing about 250 types (Rodzi & Lee, 2021; Voidarou et al., 2020).

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.

1. Introduction Cider is an alcoholic beverage produced from apple juice that has gone through alcoholic fermentation (AF) with yeasts and, frequently, malolactic fermentation (MLF) with lactic acid bacteria (LABs) [1]. These yeasts and bacteria play a crucial role in the fermentation of fruit wines by producing flavoring substances, such as esters, organic acids and terpenes [2].