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Original air date:
12.19.07
Science is Putting New Wine in New Bottles
The basics of winemaking haven't changed in generations: picking the fruit at the optimum time, extracting the juice, adding yeast to ferment the wine by turning sugar into alcohol, then aging the product until it's ready to drink. But modern vintners are increasingly relying on science and technology to create even greater vintages.
At outfits like Clos de la Tech, a California winery that adorns its labels with a computer chip, high tech helps make what they believe is a superior Pinot Noir. The fields are wired with solar powered probes that monitor both weather conditions and the health of the vines. The probes communicate wirelessly with a computer database, allowing the vintners to make highly informed decisions about watering, harvesting and disease control. They also use a new type of wine press that reduces the amount of time required to extract juice from grapes from half a day to half an hour. They're even experimenting with an aroma machine to capture vapors normally lost in the fermenting process.
Not to be outdone by the Americans, French winemakers have developed a machine that can sample up to 200 grapes a day, measuring their color, acidity, sugar content and maturity. That allows vineyards to precisely determine the optimum moment to harvest. And though many purists are appalled, many wineries also introduce measured amounts of oxygen into wine to accelerate the aging process - a technique known as micro-oxygenation.
Join Ziya Tong on a wine-tasting trip to some of California's most technologically advanced vineyards. And check out our WIRED SCIENCE web original feature article, Screwing with Wine, to learn why more wine bottles are produced with screw caps instead of corks - and whether that's a good thing.
64 Posts
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12.19.07 9:01 PM PST
christine
The process is all a mystery,who do you turn sugar into wine?
12.21.07 9:46 PM PST
ugo
Why bother with grapes at all? why not just gather all the necessary chemicals and mix 'em up? Strikes me that growing grapes is just a waste of time and energy.
12.24.07 12:22 AM PST
dalas
What was the name of the "natural" vineyard again?
1.2.08 9:25 AM PST
dude
Love Ziya Tong in that wet suit!
8.10.08 5:53 PM PDT
Megan
As a vintner's daughter, let me tell you: We have almost no understanding of flavor and taste in wine. There are so many different flavor chemicals, not to mention things like sugar, acid, alcohol, the influence of the terroir and grape varietal that it would be absolutely impossible to create a wine without the grapes. It's not Kool-Aid; It's really complex.
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