Startup Ava Winery, based in… you guessed it, San Francisco, believes that synthetic wine is the future and is working to bottle laboratory-created wines derived from a base of water and high-proof liquor. Most surprisingly, is that the liquid would actually include no grapes at all.
The concept is simple in theory, reverse engineer the perfect bottle of wine in a lab to figure out what makes it “perfect” and then chemically re-engineer it. Ava’s founders that by freeing wine from the grape harvest they are creating a more environmentally sustainable, predictable and cost-effective beverage. “The product we end up with is chemically identical to wine”, co-founder Alex Lee said. “It’s indistinguishable at a molecular level.” They also swear that the majority of consumers who taste the wine side-by-side with a traditional product can’t tell the difference between the synthetic wine and the one made from fermented grapes.
With everything that we have seen take place recently in California with fires and France with frost, this concept is starting to gain more widespread attention and not sound quite as crazy as it once did.
Source: San Jose Mercury News, July 2017