wine cellar
Wine in The Modern Age
The Death of Terroir, The Rise of Science
– PART 1
–
by Dan Gatlin, Inwood Estates Vineyards
The year is 2023. A woman shops at her regular supermarket
and approaches the wine aisle. She reaches into her purse and
removes a device similar to an iPhone (or maybe is an iPhone).
She holds it up to the wine on the shelves as she appears to snap
a photo, only this time her device returns a very different result.
On her display, she sees each wine with a number beside the
label. The number is a compiled summary of all the chemical
characteristics in the wine. This number is a very, very accurate
numeric representation of exactly how the wine tastes.
Likewise, she knows her “Wine Number”, which is something
like her “Sleep Number”, to borrow from a famous ad campaign.
With this knowledge, she can be assured that she knows
exactly what she is buying.
Gone are the days when she needed somebody on the floor to
come up and ask her banal questions like, “So you like sweet or
dry?”, “Chardonnay or Merlot?” and the like. In fact, gone are
the days when she needed anyone to help with anything since
on the next aisle she will repeat the process and find out
exactly what is in every single food item she purchases,
whether canned, frozen, fresh or shrink-wrapped. Each is represented by some sort of numeric “summary”, but all she has to
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do is tap a couple of times if she has any specific questions about
preservatives, chemicals that are organic or non-organic, etc.
I’m not talking about information on the label. I’m not talking
about RFID. I’m not talking about QR codes. I’m talking about
a real-time scan of exactly what’s in there, regardless of what
the manufacturer or people in the trade claim is in there.
Impossible, you say! Think again. The Magic Machines are here
now. And like all high technology, they’re getting cheaper and
faster and smaller every year.
Welcome to Wine XRay. The machine measures phenolic compounds in wine. Phenols are the building blocks of flavors in
wines, and, for that matter, the wider world of food science.
Most people are under the impression that flavor comes from
sugars in ripe grapes. But that’s only what people associate
with raw fruit that tastes good. Sugar only makes alcohol, and
alcohol is colorless and tasteless. Almost everything you like
about a wine, it’s florals and fruits, etc., come from phenolic
compounds.
So what’s the implication? Quoting an article about Wine
XRay, “In the subjective world of wine, phenolics are in some