The Dark Side of Wine Science
There is more philosophy in a bottle of wine than all the books.
—Louis Pasteur
The scientists I met throughout my journey were an invigorating lot, full of ideals and energy about wine old and new. McGovern, Vouillamoz, and others used high-tech to illuminate the past, save rare grapes, and tweak winemaking traditions. However, I should have remembered that science can be a wrecking-ball for tradition, too. Outside of the lab it doesn’t always go where you expect. Einstein changed our understanding of the universe, which helped lay the theoretical foundations for atomic weapons. DARPA, the federal military research agency, created the proto-Internet; today we have (so far) Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which seem to rule many people’s lives.
Take Ava Winery. Started in San Francisco by two recent biotech grads, Ava aims to create synthetic wines without using grapes. The end product is about 85 percent water, 13 percent ethanol, and 2 percent chemical flavor and aroma compounds. While I looked to the past for inspiration, Ava looked into the future. “Picture how humanity creates food in 5,000 years. We believe foods will be designed the way clothing is designed and printed with the ease that we print on paper today,” Ava proclaims in their mission statement. “The future of creating foods with total control can’t be realized if we don’t understand the ‘inks’ that will be used to print these foods. Ava’s pursuit of the molecular reconstruction of food will help push the envelope of the food tech revolution.”
The pitch brought to mind Star Trek-y gadgets that dispense food and drink with a few buttons, and my appetite was not whetted. Yet Ava was inspired by an experience I could relate to. The founders had seen a 1973 bottle of Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, which beat out French wines in the legendary (to California winemakers) or infamous (to the French) Judgment of Paris, a 1976 showdown between early California wines and Old World ones that wasn’t supposed to be a contest, and certainly wasn’t supposed to see the French lose (the Smithsonian even has a bottle of the Montelena). When Ava’s founders saw a bottle of the wine with a price of over ten thousand dollars they realized it “was hopelessly out of our reach. But what if we could re-create it, molecule by molecule? Certainly, it should taste the same. And while the replica might not bring as much pleasure to our egos as drinking a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine, it should bring pleasure to our palates.”
Most serious wine lovers can relate. Yet Ava hasn’t taken the industry by storm. They seem to have made the mistake of offering an early batch of the synthetic wine to a few journalists. New Scientist compared it to Italian Ruffino, and found, “The smell was the first thing that gave the synthetic stuff away.” One person described it as “the smell of those inflatable sharks you take to the pool.” But I wouldn’t count Ava out yet. Another reviewer wrote that it “tasted better than it smelled,” with fruity pear, peach, and even floral notes, and reported that the “winery” was still tinkering with formulas.
Synthetic wines could be more acceptable to future generations. In late 2016 a BBC Travel story featured Gïk Blue, a Spanish company that added pigments to red and white grapes, creating a “sweet, electric-blue wine that has some raising their eyebrows and others raising their glasses.” Co-founder Aritz López said he created the wine “for fun,” and that he wanted “to shake things up and see what happens . . . and the wine industry looked like the perfect place to start.”
Seen from a broader food-world perspective, these shudder-worthy creations may be a trend. Around the same time Gïk released its wine, New York Times food critic Daniel Duane reflected, “For baby boomers who moved to the Bay Area in search of the unfussy good life, in the late 20th century, it was all about squinting just right to make our dry coastal hills look like Provence—per the instructions of the Francophile chefs Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters of the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. [. . .] Today, Northern California has been taken over by a tech-boom generation with vastly more money and a taste for the existential pleasures of problem solving.”
Another new product announcement floored me, too. In late 2016 a company called Vinome attracted venture capital with this pitch: “What if wines could be scientifically selected for you based on your DNA?” I had struggled to find obscure wines or afford famous ones, and now Vinome said all I had to do was send them a sample of my DNA to find happiness in a glass. They claimed to have “curated hundreds of scientific studies to isolate genetic variations that are shown to be associated with taste and smell,” then arranged for hundreds of people to taste and rate wines, while also testing their DNA for key genetic markers.
“Explore and enjoy! No guesswork. No intimidation. Just great wines, perfectly paired to you,” the pitch said. I was somewhat appalled, but still curious. I took their brief test, which featured a half-dozen questions, such as “Do you think you prefer sweet and fruity wines or wines with oak and earthy flavors?” At the end they asked me to agree to the Terms and Conditions, which promised that my DNA would remain mine, except that “By submitting DNA to Vinome, you grant Vinome a perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide, transferable license to use your de-identified DNA, and to use, host, sublicense and distribute the anonymous resulting analysis to the extent and in the form or context we deem appropriate on or through any media or medium and with any technology or devices now known or hereafter developed or discovered.”
All of a sudden, my years spent tracking down Cremisan and trips to the mountains of Georgia felt like a reasonable price to pay for a fine wine, compared to forking over DNA to a company I knew little about. I did more research and found that Vinome had partnered with Helix, a global genomics powerhouse. The Helix press release about Vinome opened by touting new partnerships with National Geographic and New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Helix said it is also building new applications “that harness DNA and the science of taste to match personalized epicurean experiences and products with consumers.”
The health and medicine news agency STAT asked geneticist Jim Evans, a professor at the University of North Carolina, to comment on Vinome. He said, “It’s just completely silly. Their motto of ‘A little science and a lot of fun’ would be more accurately put as ‘No science and a lot of fun.’ I’d put this in the same category as DNA matching to find your soulmate. We just simply don’t know enough about the genetics of taste to do this on any accurate basis.” Not only that, Vinome reportedly plans to sell the wines for sixty-five dollars a bottle. For that price you can find many outstanding vintages at any decent store.
Stepping back, Vinome and Ava made me contemplate how wine lovers got to such a place, where deciding what pleases us supposedly requires a DNA test. Yet perhaps the predicament isn’t fundamentally new. Wine drinkers have always been wary of strange mixtures. Steven Shapin, a History of Science professor at Harvard, noted that a character in the 1771 book The Expedition of Humphry Clinker laments, “What passes for wine among us [the English], is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making.”
Whatever the future holds for synthetic wine and other creations, regulators are using scientific advances to keep up. Today the US Department of the Treasury operates a Beverage Alcohol Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, with a dizzying list of responsibilities: screening products for contaminants, adulterants, and unauthorized additives, as well as handling mislabeling and fraud investigations, smuggling and counterfeiting, and pre-import testing of foreign wines. While alcohol taxes date to the very beginning of the country (they helped pay off Revolutionary War debt) the Treasury now uses liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, and other tools. Government lab spec sheets reveal that ethanol has a basic chemical formula of C2H6O and a molar or atomic weight of 46.0684. That is more than carbon (12.0107) or sulfur (32.065), but less than copper (63.546) or uranium (238.0289).
Perhaps all is not gloom and doom. Honestly made, distinctive wines have found their place in America. For more than forty years Kermit Lynch has sold only wines from small producers. His business has steadily increased. Yes, he told me, there are a lot of easy drinking, not very distinctive wines. But that’s part of life. “I’m kind of philosophic about it. It’s like in music, pop music. I think there are pop wines—wines made to be popular. That’s the idea, the winemaker sets out to do it. And then you have more serious composers.”
As much as I love traditional winemaking, vineyards may be forced to embrace some technological change. When my travels began climate wasn’t part of the story. Now I see that it is. José Vouillamoz talks about it as he promotes native grapes, even if some consider the subject taboo. “Global warming, or climate change, is a fact. I’m not discussing here the causes—it’s a fact,” he told me. “And many different areas of the economy will have to deal with it, including viticulture. [In] 2014, at the Masters of Wine Symposium, when I tackled this topic, many people came to me and said, ‘Wow, you are courageous. No one dares speak about that.’ And I had a fake bottle of Romanée-Conti—I say this as a joke, because it’s one of the most counterfeited wines in the world, as well as the most expensive. I faked it on Photoshop; it was obvious. And I put on the label, the vintage, 2214. And I was asking the audience what do you think will be in this bottle, in two hundred years from now. Will there still be Pinot Noir, as it is today, or something else? What are the solutions to face global warming?”
Vouillamoz said Pinot Noir grapes in Burgundy are already out of the optimal window of cultivation because of increasing heat, yet Romanée-Conti’s legendary owners would turn in their graves if future generations plant some other variety. It would be like planting date palms to replace the Washington, DC, cherry trees.
“So if you want to keep Pinot you can do adjustments, but at some point you will need some more help,” Vouillamoz said. That means somehow tweaking the Pinot variety, perhaps with heat-resistant genes from some obscure ancient vine.
In California Randall Grahm hopes that Popelouchum leads to flavorful grapes that can thrive in a warmer world. I asked him if many other people there are concerned about climate change threats. “The customers and the wine writers are more interested than the grape growers. I don’t know that a lot of [vineyards] are thinking about it so much,” he said. “Grape growers and winemakers are mostly worried about sales and relationships with their bankers, and wholesalers, than they are grapes of the future. In this country we don’t really think much long-term.”
I know it’s easier to just enjoy wonderful wines, and not think about climate change or pesticides. Just remember that vineyards do impact the environment. The wine choices we make can help lessen the harm.