Ava Winery wants to re-create drinks in the lab, including some chemically identical to expensive old wines. Will it work?
The most fascinating wine project I’ve come across this year has no need for vineyards, barrels, or,a winery. It doesn’t even use grapes. If you believe what the people behind the project say, they could be on the brink of challenging everything that people hold dear about wine.
Though they don’t quite put it this way, Ava Winery could be as disruptive in its field as fellow West Coast tech businesses such as Airbnb, Amazon or Uber. Founded in 2015 by a pair of biotechnologists and a sommelier, the San Francisco start-up has spent the past two years developing a way to re-create wines “molecule by molecule”, using flavour molecules, sugars, acids and ethanol derived from natural sources.
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