If Ava Winery’s Alec Lee and Mardon Chua have their way, that day is coming soon. Biotech graduates from the University of British Columbia, in 2015 they formed Ava to create wine in a lab. Inspired by the thought that “wine is just a collection of molecules”--but a very special collection, to be sure--the pair brought fellow UBC graduate and certifiedsommelier Josh Decolongon on board as a co-founder, and began experimenting.

Chua was inspired to create wine in a lab by seeing a bottle of ‘73 Chateau Montelena behind a glass case and wishing more people could taste and appreciate it. Reasoning that his biotech and analytical chemistry background might let him make copies of epic vintages in a flask, he began trying to reverse-engineer wines in what initially was a fast-and-loose process.

In his first weekend, he made about 15 different batches, mixing "tartaric acid, malic acid, tannin powder, vegetable glycerin, ethanol, sucrose, ethyl hexanoate (smells like pineapple), butanoate (strong scent of grape juice), limonene (citrus/lime), and acetoin (rich butter smell—like popcorn at the movies)." By his own admission, none of these attempts were very close to good wine, although they were “acceptable enough” to drink. Questions about what this recent college student considers “acceptable enough” not with standing, he’s had the intestinal fortitude to document his experiments on Medium for all the Internet to see.

Since those early, heady days (last April), Ava’s product has become more refined, and the company has begun using more sophisticated analytic instruments including both gas and liquid chromatography to tease out just what makes a wine so tasty. Wine is about 85% water and 13% ethanol, with several hundred other compounds being present in varying amounts. Ava has been outsourcing this analysis, but plans to move their testing in house. Their goal is to further quantify the trace elements in wine to improve their final product.

Thus far, they’ve only enjoyed limited success, but according to Sommelier Decolongon Ava’s product is “getting closer and closer” to traditional wines every day. Now, the company is looking forward to the regulatory and marketing challenges of not only having their product recognized as “wine”, but also introducing it to a skeptical population of wine lovers.

So, is the future of wine synthetic? Certainly companies like Ava and Replica Wine (a less-radical wine disruptor that uses science to make grape blends that taste like more expensive bottles) believe it to be possible, but at this point it’s not possible to buy a wine replicator a la Star Trek, but who can say what the future will bring? For now, we’ll still rely on vineyards and wineries to produce the wines we love so much. And, when you need to build, expand or remodel your wine-related facilities, you can rely on Sierra View General Contractors to give you a quality build, on time and within budget. To see the Sierra View portfolio, including their previous wine industry work, visit them on the web at SierraView.com.

http://medium.com/@mardonn/hacking-wine-e5ed219f3605#.zfqw19chx

http://www.businessinsider.com/ava-winery-says-its-nearly-perfected-wine-in-a-lab-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T