The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts (2014)

I used to make a living as a mastering engineer, where the job description is to make many tiny changes near or even beyond the threshold of perception, which when summed may add up to a perceptible whole. How to do this? It's simple: isolate and magnify. Zoom in to where your senses become reliable, make a change informed by your knowledge and experience which you predict will be beneficial, then zoom out. You don't need "golden ears" to be…

That's a classic but lately a swedish journalist uncovered that the wine we drink in Europe is largely bogus. Apparently wine distributors are not required to declare contents and they can use up to 60 approved ingredients, ecological wine had 30 or 40 approved ingredients. And the issue is with the industrial yeast that they use. This is apparently tailored yeast to give the wine flavor like mango or pomegranate. The flavors listed by the manufacturer of the industrial yeast…

Going beyond food coloring, here's an interesting recent attempt to create a synthetic Chardonnay from Tartaric acid, Malic acid, Tannin powder, Vegetable glycerin, Ethanol (Everclear), Sucrose, Ethyl hexanoate (smells like pineapple), Butanoate (strong scent of grape juice), Limonene (citrus/lime), and Acetoin (rich butter smell — like popcorn at the movies): https://medium.com/@mardonn/hacking-wine-e5ed219f3605