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For more than two years now — from the second floor of a repurposed warehouse in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco — the young scientists and chemists at Ava Winery have been attempting to save the planet and conduct commerce by producing wine without grapes or fermentation. Recently, the company rebranded and shifted its focus: now known as Endless West, it is attempting to make brown spirits without the hidebound utilization of barrels for maturation.
In Endless West's 1,800-square-foot lab, there are no implements ordinarily associated with making wine or whiskey. Instead, one sees chemists quietly sitting at computers beside beakers, gas chromatography and mass spectrometer machines, and something called a liquid handling robot, which is loaded with test tubes that are filled with liquid from "real" wines and spirits. The white-smocked bio and analytical chemists are measuring and mapping the molecular profiles of standard alcoholic beverages. There is even a scanning area with an "electronic nose" to measure olfactory properties; something you likely won't find in a standard winery lab.
The quest is to tease out which "naturally derived" carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, amino acids, and lipids comprise a wine or spirit, and which components encompass the organoleptic profiles of various alcoholic beverages. Key aromatics and flavor molecules are being identified such as citrus-like esters from ethyl isobutyrate and pineapple-y aromas derived from ethyl hexanoate or the buttery qualities found in the compound diacetyl.
Once recognized, neutral distillates or grain alcohol is then added to the recipe to synthetically formulate a wine or whiskey.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 30 2018, @02:29PM
This is far from the first time someone has tried to do something like this, although Endless West's approach might have some advantages.
Tested: A Chemical Time Machine Makes Whiskey Taste Older, Faster [popsci.com]
How A Distillery Ages Bourbon In Days, Not Years [npr.org]
The scientific tricks that can age whiskey in days instead of years [qz.com]
The scientific arms race to age our whiskey [arstechnica.com]
Instead of using tricks to artificially age whiskey, they want to create the compounds and mix them. That kind of approach sounds a bit like a "chemputer". One day, maybe a relatively tiny machine will be able to output "whiskey" or other substances.
As for the wine thing, it seems that they found out that it was harder than they thought [foodandwine.com], so they switched to whiskey:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]