Wine research news: the improbable edition

Some wine research is revelatory: it provides an “aha!” moment for some long-standing grape growing or winemaking question. Some wine research is disappointing: it doesn’t come up with the answer we wanted, or an answer at all. And some wine research is just plain weird. This week, a few entries in the weird category:

Using fruit flies as model sniffers – Drosophilia melanogaster, the common fruit fly, ranks right up there with the mouse and Escherichia coli as a hyper-common lab animal: their giant chromosomes make them easy targets for genetics research. What I didn’t know before? They’re also good for sniffing research. Some computational neuroscientists in the UK used flies to look for differences between brain responses to familiar and unfamiliar odor molecules? Familiar for a fly? Wine aroma molecules, of course. No word from the research group on whether the flies’ tasting notes will be released at a later date.

Impregnating yeast with wood aromas – We have oak adjuncts: cheap, convenient chips to mimic expensive, bulky barrels. We have lees aging: letting wine sit on the sludge of dead yeast cells left over after fermentation to yield flavor and texture. Ever thought of putting the two together? The idea somehow occurred to a group of Spanish enologists, who used the sometimes-spongelike qualities of yeast cell walls to absorb flavors from wood chips, then steeped the yeast gunk in red wine. The “wood-aromatised yeast lees” released woody flavors back into the wine, and both tasters and chemical analyses could show a difference (tasters particularly appreciated chestnut-infused wine, which was more plummy and spicy than oak, acacia, or cherry wood). The idea appears to be making wood-flavored wine faster, though it’s hard to see why using dead yeast as wood chip sponges is better than just using the wood chips.

Grape marc as an herbicide – Grape marc (or pomace, or solid leftover grape bits) isn’t usually considered toxic. Quite the contrary: it’s a common livestock feed for ranchers who live in wine regions. So it seems odd that mixing a chemical herbicide with marc made the herbicide a more potent plant killer, but that’s what a group of French plant scientists found: the mix specifically increased the herbicide’s cell killing capacity. The herbicide in question is less toxic than many other agricultural chemicals, but strategies to use less of the stuff by augmenting it with a natural (and otherwise pretty darn safe) waste product are mighty appealing nonetheless.

None of these studies will win an Ig Nobel — for research that makes you laugh, and then makes you think — though Ron Washam recently had a few suggestions for MW thesis topics that just might, should anyone have enough chutzpah to take them up. Embarrassingly and disappointingly enough, the only instance of wine-related research or a wine-related researcher being granted an Ig Nobel was in 2005, when Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute was part of the team that won that year’s biology prize for carefully creating a catalogue of the smells 131 different frog species produce when they’re stressed. Enology is such an excellent repository of enjoyable, engaging, thought-provoking, and sometimes silly research; surely, we can do better…or worse?

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