With us you can buy a bottle of the famous Dom Pérignon champagne for 50 euros instead of 200 euros! An offer that doesn’t sound bad. But is the content really real? At least it was the offer.
In 2016, the start-up “Ava Winery” in San Francisco attracted worldwide attention. His big promise was to produce a bottle of 1992 Dom Pérignon for a quarter of the price. Grapes should no longer be necessary for this, but only the molecules or components of a wine. This includes amino acids, sugars, ethanol, acids and volatile organic compounds. Because in the Ava Winery, wine was produced in the laboratory, without fermentation, within 15 minutes. “We create a digital copy and make our own product out of it,” said company founder Lee at the time. Nothing has been heard from him since 2018. However, the dream is not over and haunts the wine industry again and again.
The commercial path for this type of wine has already been paved. Synthetic production processes are banned in Germany, but the sale of so-called artificial wines is permitted in the EU when the wine trade agreement came into force in 2006. There is analogue cheese and there is analogue ham. Why not also artificial wine?
According to Professor Helmut Guth, food chemist and aroma specialist at the University of Wuppertal, that would not be a problem. As early as 1997 he artificially produced a wine, namely a Gewürztraminer. Deliberately a white wine, since a red wine might be too complex and even more difficult to “clone”.
Every wine drinker knows that a wine has its own aroma profile. Using gas chromatography, in which the drink is heated and the ingredients are filtered out of the gas mixture, Guth discovered 600 odors and flavors in the white wine. Just 25 was enough for him, which he released in a water-ethanol mixture to recreate the taste of the original. Guth combined these elements with the wine lactone, a chemical compound that is crucial for the taste of the wine. Guth was the first in the world to prove it.
In practice, the analogue wine was able to hold its own with many laypeople and experts. At least in the parallel tasting of simple industrial wines and the artist, there was no winner. However, the laboratory analyzes could not deceive. The glycerin content and the much too high ratio of glycerin to alcohol as well as the lack of minerals could certainly be corrected with a little research. The artificial wine contained no phenols, polyphenols and shikimic acid, which should not be a major hurdle for today’s science.
Allegedly, however, the attractive properties in combination with food or in the aging behavior were missing. And to imitate this should be quite a big hurdle. Luckily, the biggest hurdle is the price. Because it is still much more lucrative to produce a bad cheap wine than an artificial wine – at least for now.
Silvio Nitzsche is Sommelier and runs the WeinKulturBar in Dresden.