Where LEV2050's EIC Accelerator Wine Yeast Reactor Stands Today

Every vineyard carries its own yeasts and bacteria, and many winemakers believe they shape a wine's character as much as soil and climate. Most wineries still ferment with freeze-dried commercial strains bought by the kilo, because growing their own microbes in useful quantities is slow, unreliable and messy. Inbiolev SL, a company from Navarra in northern Spain that trades as LEV2050, sells the missing step: it isolates a winery's native strains, keeps them in its strain bank and installs automated bioreactors in the cellar that multiply them before each fermentation.

In June 2019 the European Commission selected its project ECOBIOMASS in the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. The list names Inbiolev as the only beneficiary of the project. The EU contribution was €1,003,835 towards a total cost of €1,434,050, and the project ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2022, according to CORDIS. Its stated aim was to introduce the system in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal, with the United States as a later step.

Where LEV2050 Stands in 2026

The company is trading and still sells mainly to wineries. In December 2025 VA Filtration, a winery equipment supplier in Napa, California, signed an exclusive agreement to distribute LEV2050's BR-LEV-LC and BR-CV bioreactors in North America and Chile, according to Wine Industry Advisor. VA Filtration's own product page lists reactors from 75 to 5,000 litres and repeats the maker's claim that they cut yeast use by up to 90%. That figure is the company's; no independent trial measuring it was found.

The Spanish company register shows a business that has grown up. Inbiolev replaced its sole administrator with a board of directors on 17 May 2024, rewrote its articles in August 2024 and has deposited accounts up to 2024, according to the BORME entries collected by Empresia and DatosCif. The board seats Joaquín Senosiain of Stellum next to the founder. No insolvency or liquidation entry appears.

Two details in the public record do not match. The register gives the registered office as the Plazaola industrial estate in Aizoáin, Berrioplano, where it moved in June 2018, while the company website gives an address in Mutilva. And the founding year is 2010 in the company's own history and in the 2024 investment announcement, but the register records the start of trading as 3 February 2011.

The Technology: Growing a Winery's Own Yeasts On Site

The method has two parts. First LEV2050 samples grapes from a client's vineyard, isolates the yeasts and lactic acid bacteria, identifies them and runs small test fermentations to pick strains with the fermentation and aroma profile the winemaker wants. R&D director Miguel Romano told CORDIS that the team favours strains that are "more genetically distant" and builds a culture medium for each one. Second, the chosen strains are grown in the cellar in patented reactors that control temperature, pH, oxygen, stirring and feed, and that can be watched from a phone, according to the company's bioreactor page. The BR-CV line makes the yeast starter, the pied de cuve, for the second fermentation of sparkling wine.

The established alternative is the active dry yeast that most wineries buy each harvest. Native fermentation without a starter is the other route, but it is hard to control. LEV2050's pitch sits between the two: a winery's own strains, grown fresh and in controlled conditions. The bioreactors were not new in 2019. Bodega Pirineos, a Somontano winery of the Barbadillo group, bought two 1,000-litre BR-LEV-LC units for about €50,000 of biotech investment in 2016, Alimarket reported, and the company dates its first patented reactors to 2014.

What ECOBIOMASS Promised, and What the Record Shows

The grant was not for invention but for market entry. The CORDIS objective describes ECOBIOMASS as strain selection, bioreactor installation at the customer and a supply of nutrients, and sets one goal: introduction in the reference wine markets of Spain, France, Italy and Portugal, with a "prescription effect" that would open other producing countries including the USA. The final periodic report, for October 2021 to March 2022, says the company completed trials in European wineries, held demonstrations, contacted distributors in the target countries and attended trade fairs, and that wineries had shown interest in "potentially becoming customers". The CORDIS article adds that trials ran "in France, Italy and Portugal and with highly prestigious wineries", without naming them.

The project ended on its scheduled date. The report itself records no signed customers, and it says further demonstrations and two more trade fairs would follow after the end of the grant. The customer numbers given later fill part of that gap: over 100 wineries in April 2021, according to an interview with the chief executive in Interempresas, which also names the Champagne and Prosecco regions among its markets, and 170 wineries in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Argentina and Chile in March 2024, according to Capital Riesgo and Alimarket. Both 2024 reports draw on the same announcement, and no split by country is public.

1. Winery trials outside SpainDeliveredFrance, Italy and Portugal, per CORDIS; wineries not named.
2. Clients in the four reference marketsDeliveredAll four among 170 client countries in 2024; counts per country not public.
3. Distributors in target countriesUnverifiedContacts reported; no European distributor named.
4. Later step: the United StatesDeliveredVA Filtration deal, December 2025.
5. Project on scheduleDeliveredEnded 31 March 2022 as planned; three periodic reports.

The Money

ECOBIOMASS was Inbiolev's second Horizon 2020 grant. In 2015 it received €50,000 for MYBIOASSET, a six-month SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study on using a winery's own microbes as a competitive asset, according to CORDIS. No other EU project of the company was found. Its later work on soil microbes, AGRI-NOVO with the Navarra farmers' union UAGN and Artajo, lists funding from Spain's CDTI, the Government of Navarra and the European Regional Development Fund on the company's project page; the amounts are not given.

Private money followed. In March 2024 Stellum Capital's Stellum Food&Tech fund and Inveready's Inveready Biotech IV fund took 25% of the company between them, according to Capital Riesgo and Alimarket. Neither report gives the price or says whether the funds bought new shares or existing ones from the founder; the register shows no capital increase since 2016, when share capital reached €4,484. The 2024 announcement put the staff at 20, half of them in research. Inbiolev is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which is consistent with a grant-only award.

The filed accounts are not freely available. Empresia, which summarises them, puts annual turnover above €2.5 million and staff at 17, while Infonif shows about one employee. Equity, debt and net results could not be verified, so no chart of them is shown here.

Why It Matters for Europe

Origin wines in the EU are protected designation of origin products, and the CORDIS summary pitches ECOBIOMASS as a tool for such wines to express a local identity through their own microbes. A strain bank of about 18,000 yeasts, bacteria and fungi, the figure on the company's wine page, is also a piece of European biological infrastructure held by a small Navarra firm rather than by a supplier outside the EU.

The company's newer direction ties into EU farm policy. The Farm to Fork strategy aims to cut fertiliser use by at least 20% and the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030. The company's own history dates its first field studies and farm reactor installations, which grow microbes for biofertilisation and biocontrol, to 2021, and most of its 2026 blog posts, such as one on biofertilisers, address farmers rather than winemakers. The company still lists winemaking first on its wine sector page, where it says it produced 250 custom yeasts in 2024. This is a widening of the same reactor technology, not a change of course.

The Verdict

Inbiolev and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It rests on the CORDIS records, the Spanish company register as published by commercial aggregators, press reports and the company's own pages, all linked above.