I swirl the glass and stick my nose in it. Fruit. Sun. Taking a sip, I taste citrus, hay and rock. Right away I wonder if there might be another bottle. I dig into the buttery sablefish and dainty carrots that have just been brought in and drink another mouthful, letting the wine’s clean finish linger. As if reading my mind, my host pours again. No, I’m not dining at a winery restaurant, and the man topping up my glass isn’t a sommelier or even a waiter. And although I’m technically in a cellar, it’s the basement of the nondescript Land and Food Systems building at the University of British Columbia. Yes, all this wining and dining is in the service of science.
Hennie van Vuuren, my drinking buddy and the founding director of UBC’s Wine Research Centre, works here to make the fickle art of winemaking more predictable and productive. While grape varietal and terroir are the pin-ups of the wine world, van Vuuren’s obsession is yeast, a lowly single-celled fungus. And no wonder – more than 200 strains are used to bring out different flavours in grapes. But to take winemaking into the 21st century, van Vuuren et al have come up with genetically engineered yeasts, putting Canada on the scientific wine map and giving vintners the potential to consistently churn out great wines – like the Didier Dagueneau Pur Sang sauvignon blanc we polish off in the centre’s wood-panelled tasting room.
In conventional winemaking, yeast is first added to the grape juice (a.k.a. the must) to transform sugar into alcohol and flavour compounds. Then certain bacteria are thrown in to convert harsh malic acid into the gentler lactic acid, reducing acidity and headache-inducing allergens and improving flavour. Trouble is, these friendly microbes often underperform, leaving a sour note on the palate and causing headaches among some 30 percent of the wine-drinking public, van Vuuren and me included. (And to think that my friends have always blamed my hangovers on overindulgence.) “I adore wine,” says van Vuuren as we stroll through the Wine Research Centre’s temperature- and humidity-controlled Wine Library and Vinotheque, which has space for up to 30,000 bottles in its floor-to-ceiling redwood racks. “But I react to the histamines in reds and some whites, so I had to do something.”
The vinophile prof set out to create a yeast that would magically transmute all, not just some, of the offending acid; in the process, he beat out other scientists who’d been scratching their heads for three decades trying to solve the same riddle. Van Vuuren’s team took two genes from organisms already used in winemaking and added them to the DNA of a commercial yeast. The new, patented yeast – ML01, the world’s first genetically engineered yeast that’s available for sale – ferments the must and converts the malic acid in one fell swoop, for a better-tasting, headache-free wine. At least in theory.
To take winemaking into the 21st century, UBC scientists have come up with ways to genetically enhance the process, putting Canada on the scientific wine map and giving vintners the potential to consistently churn out great bottles.
Arriving at Calona Vineyards in Kelowna, in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, I expect something more, well, Falcon Crest. Instead, I enter a suburban-looking office building, where the avuncular Howard Soon greets me. He hands me a hairnet – “Imagine if your co-workers could see you now!” he laughs – and ushers me through the factory-like plant, past stainless steel fermentation tanks, oak barrels and grape presses and crushers, before we climb a vinyl-tiled staircase to his office.
While van Vuuren claims winemaking is 90 percent science and 10 percent art, Soon, who is the senior vintner for Calona’s high-end Sandhill Wines brand and also sits on the Wine Research Centre’s advisory board, contends it’s more like 50-50. “It’s tempting to winemakers to think that if they use, say, ML01, it will produce a flavour that everyone will love, but that would move winemaking into something for technicians,” he says. “The art is still in finding the true expression of the vineyard. And it’s in the blending.”
He underscores his point in the tasting lab, a room only slightly larger than a walk-in closet and bedecked with beakers and plastic whisky bottles containing wines from around the world “for comparison.” The task at hand is to rate one pure malbec and two malbec blends to fine-tune the concoction that ultimately goes in the bottle. Joined by Soon’s two winemaker colleagues, we sniff, slurp and chew. We spit. Or not. By the time our teeth are stained purple, the verdict is in: The malbec is good enough to hold its own. “You see, we do a bit more cooking than van Vuuren,” Soon says.
Soon tested ML01 on a red wine, hoping it would convert all the malic acid, leaving only lactic acid for a smoother result. It didn’t, so he blended the wine with a conventional red. “Here we don’t have the same hyper-controlled environment as at UBC,” he says. Yet he isn’t about to write off biotechnology in the winemaking process. “Understanding how the wine yeast genome works helps us understand the interaction of yeast with grape components, so that we can produce a delicious wine,” he says, predicting that the use of grape and yeast genomics in winemaking will grow from a mostly experimental practice in the Okanagan Valley to become mainstream within only five years.
When I’m having lunch the following day with Tom DiBello at Crush Bistro in Vernon, at the north end of Okanagan Lake, the wine consultant echoes Soon’s opinion not to discount the old ways when they work. “But if someone gives you a better paintbrush, you can push the boundaries. I’ve got two ML01 wines fermenting right now,” he says over a Pentâge pinot gris. As far as he’s concerned, the novel yeast works as advertised, but particularly well with chardonnay and pinot gris. Despite that, vintners who use ML01 prefer to keep it under wraps. (Indeed, not a single person I ask will tell me who uses it.) “They’re concerned their wines are not going to sell,” DiBello says and finishes his spicy sausage pasta. “The perception among some consumers is it’s Frankenwine, but it’s safe. It’s been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and by Health Canada.”
Which makes me think of another of van Vuuren’s patented wine yeasts. Engineered with health safety in mind, the strain cuts ethyl carbamate by up to 92 percent – a good reason to raise a glass since this compound, which occurs naturally in wine and other fermented drinks, has been linked to cancer. With these and other breakthroughs, it’s no mystery why oenology and viticulture students from such formidable wine-producing countries as Italy, France and South Africa choose UBC. And it can’t hurt that, like their prof’s job description, their curriculum includes the arduous task of drinking some of the finest wines on the planet. The day that I left UBC, I found evidence of this merry education in a glass cabinet: empty bottles of Château Margaux, which is still on my to-drink list, the Pur Sang sauvignon blanc I had just tasted and vintage champagnes I can only dream of.
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