Cloned Wine
Wine n' Business
Cloned Wine

If you really want a Rolex watch but are on a budget you can still get one. The same goes for purses, clothes, sunglasses, headphones, Picasso’s and even professional dentist chairs. Somehow, somewhere, someone is creating a cheaper replica. Usually a lot of fakes are of poorer quality than the original item. Yet in some cases the copies are executed to such a level of perfection that even experts can’t tell the difference.

wine

Photo: http://www.bizjournals.com

It seems, nonetheless, that Ava Winery still has a long way to go. The New Scientist reports that the company can turn water into wine in fifteen minutes. Not quite as fast as Jesus but definitely a close second.

The winery, if we can call it that, doesn’t use any grapes in their process. Instead they create wine by combining chemical compounds. They mix tannins, glycerin, sugar, ethyl isobutyrate and other flavor compounds together with ethanol and water, resulting into a liquid tasting like wine. The concept behind this is that they can mimic expensive wines for a fraction of the cost. And as of now you can preorder their Dom Pérignon copy for only fifty dollars, which is substantially cheaper than the original product.

But will it taste as good? It seems unlikely. The company already created their own Moscato d’Asti and the New Scientist described it as having notes of pool shark and cleaning alcohol with a lavender soap aftertaste. It wasn’t completely horrible but definitely not good enough to drink a whole glass of it.

We can assume, however, that this is only an early experimental phase. Synthetic food flavors are already used widely throughout the food and beverage industry and although creating a convincing synthetic wine will be a tough nut to crack, it wouldn’t surprise me if it becomes standard practice in the future.