Artificial wine - any talk here?

Especially considering the bit Ian quoted, this made me smile:
Chua and Lee now think they have produced an experimental synthetic wine that mimics the taste of the sparkling Italian white wine Moscato d’Asti (see our tasting notes below), and are now turning their hands to producing an imitation Dom Pérignon champagne.
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But in ten years or so, who knows? In theory white wine should be doable - but at what cost? Getting the colloidal suspensions (is that the right term) in decent red wines would be more difficult.
 
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On another tack, our building manager is Sicilian. He reckons that many Italian restaurants make their house wine with powder and water on site. I have never heard of this, has anyone here? Sounds scary.
 
To do it properly ie full replication, would be a complex task. Lots of aroma compounds (1000-1500) to start, but the real difficulty is with phenolic chemistry. Lots of different base units reacting in a variety of ways means that much of the material in the wine tannin structure is not even known at this time and thus not easily replicated.

So all in all a complex task, but probably magnitudes easier than the human genome and production of the world's first synthetic yeast. They would just have to chuck a few million at it and 50-100 research scientists and they could make some interesting discoveries along the way.

However with the limited resources they have, I am not sure they will even get close to mimicking real wine.
 
David Crossley said:
On another tack, our building manager is Sicilian. He reckons that many Italian restaurants make their house wine with powder and water on site. I have never heard of this, has anyone here? Sounds scary.
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I don't think so. The only point is if it would be possible to escape duty and there are probably simpler ways of doing that.

Although a technology for producing powdered alcohol was invented in 1979, it does not seem to have gained commercial traction anywhere.
Wikipedia quotes a written parliamentary answer from 2015, stating "The Government is not aware of powdered alcohol being marketed or made available to buy in England and Wales".
 
tony milanowski said:
...that much of the material in the wine tannin structure is not even known at this time and thus not easily replicated...
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Probably why they are working with whites. I'm guessing the choice of sparkling wine is also deliberate but I lack the technical knowledge to understand why this would make their task seem easier.

You have to admire their ambition, though. They started last year and expect to be shipping their Dom Perignon look-alike this summer. Yet the amateur tasters on the video were both unimpressed and could easily distinguish the real from the artificial.
 
tony milanowski said:
To do it properly ie full replication, would be a complex task. Lots of aroma compounds (1000-1500) to start, but the real difficulty is with phenolic chemistry. Lots of different base units reacting in a variety of ways means that much of the material in the wine tannin structure is not even known at this time and thus not easily replicated.
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All doubtless true, but I also suspect that they are right in thinking that just getting the important bits right would be enough. Still complex though. Apart from anything else, you need to know what the important bits are
 
David Crossley said:
On another tack, our building manager is Sicilian. He reckons that many Italian restaurants make their house wine with powder and water on site. I have never heard of this, has anyone here? Sounds scary.
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The Italians do enjoy a scare story, or perhaps more accurately a scare story about them lot down there, up there, or over there.

we have certainly had some very decent house wines in Trentino, with Nosiola and teroldego both performing well at this level
 
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