Synthetic wine or how to make wine without grapes

Silicon Valley is the prime location for the development of new technologies. This time, techno-scientists have embarked on an almost biblical project : turning water into wine - You can not stop progress —. The goal they have set for themselves is to make a synthetic wine. A beverage that tastes like wine, the color of the wine, wine texture, the aromas of wine is it really a wine ?

Wine in a test tube

The idea is quite simple : mix some water with a few chemicals and it makes wine - and not Chocapics —. StartUp Ava Winery specializes in creating synthetic wine by mixing water, ethanol and aromatic compounds.

"We can turn water into wine in fifteen minutes ! » Ava Winery

The information was relayed by the scientific information site The New Scientist. Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee got the idea to develop a synthetic wine during a winery tour of Napa Valley in California. While we made them taste a wine from Château Montelana, the two cronies found themselves facing a problem that many wine lovers encounter : the impossibility of affording such a good and expensive bottle.

Château Montelana became known in 1976 during a tasting at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Paris. The year, four burgundies were tasted against six Californian whites. When the scores have been counted, the French judges were convinced that the first white wine was one of theirs. In fact, it was a Chardonnay from Château Montelena from 1973. The results proved that Château Montelena - and California - could produce wines as fine as renowned Burgundy wines.

Since the existence of wine, the recipe is more or less the same : the wine comes from the fermentation of grapes and the yeasts convert the sugar in the grape juice into ethanol. The winemaker is like an alchemist who seeks to turn lead into gold. Everyone has their own way of proceeding with their little tricks that make their wine different from the neighboring winemaker. But being a winegrower also means having to deal with the vagaries of the weather or winemaking. Couldn't it be easier ?

Make way for white coats and chemistry

After a long and disastrous period of trying to mix combinations of flavors, of dosages in test tubes - and certainly digestion problems —, the two chemists succeeded in producing their very first synthetic wine. This first experimental "success" mimics Moscato d'Asti, an Italian sparkling wine. Drunk with this first success, Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee have reproduced a Dom Pérignon champagne.

Wine is a living product and each bottle can contain a thousand different components. This is what characterizes a wine, to differentiate it and love it. Assisted by a sommelier and equipped with mass spectrometers and other complex tools, they analyzed for many months the composition of famous wines. Through the identification and concentration of key flavor molecules, they mixed them together until a similar result was obtained. Synthetic wine is made up of tannins, glycerin and sugar to reproduce the texture in the mouth of the wine, of several aromatic compounds for aromas and tastes, ethanol and finally 85 % pure water.

Is it possible to exactly copy the wine ?

I do not hide from you that as a wine lover, such news leaves me perplexed. I doubt it is possible to reproduce the alchemy of wine simply by mixing products in a test tube. How could chemistry perfectly mimic the role of slow and subtle grape fermentation, the know-how of the winegrower, the contribution of the soil and the weather or even the aging of the wine ?

New Scientific was able to compare the synthetic wine to its original and the result is not really conclusive :

The objective displayed by the two scientists is purely economic. This synthetic wine dispenses with many stages and hazards of wine production. No need to grow vines anymore, to maintain them, to pick up the grapes, to sort and vinify it.

Is it a risk to produce a synthetic wine ?

In a sense, Yes…

When we imagine that scientists have managed to manufacture 500 bottles of Dom Pérignon Champagne of the vintage 1992 for 50 $ instead of 200 $ for real champagne, we are entitled to ask questions about the future of viticulture. For the time being, only great wines can perceive this news as a significant risk, but improving their synthetic wine creation process will help lower the cost of production and quality.

… But with advantages…

… which will certainly not be enough

Alain Deloire, director of the National Wine and Grape Industry Center (NWGIC), told journalist Chris Baraniuk : " it's absurd, to be honest with you ”. According to him, the terroir plays a very important role in the quality of the wine and consumers are used to choosing a bottle of wine according to the grape variety.