Wine Without Grapes: Ava Winery To Create Molecule by Molecule
by Darinee Durai
@ 25 May 2017
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.
According to co-founder Alec Lee, the project began in a San Francisco restaurant. “There was a bottle of Chateau Montelena 1973 on the wall, behind glass,” Lee tells me on the phone from the company’s headquarters. With a price tag north of $10,000, this Californian chardonnay (which beat the best of Burgundy in the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris blind tasting that helped put California on the world wine map) was way out of the reach of Lee and his business partner Mardonn Chua. “But what if we could just identify all its components and recreate the experience ourselves? We already had access to a lab. We could make the experience accessible.”
Read the full story here:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/21/uber-for-wine-ava-winery-without-grapes
