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HoytShepston_Monthly09 10/31/08 TIM PATTERSON Inquiring Winemaker Do You Know What's In That Bottle? W hich of the following would offer a more helpful description of a wine you were curious about? 1) This tasting note from a recent issue of the Wine Enthusiast: "This firm, structured wine has ripe, restrained tannins that lend the palate a sense of elegance. It's a fruity selection, packed with acidity and red berry flavors, and it has a firm finish. Keep this for at least eight years. 93 points."1 Or 2), the graphic representation on page 73, which depicts the distribution of DNA for bacteria found during a wine fermentation, from a recent paper by Nick Bokulich, a grad student in David Mills' lab at the University of California, Davis: The answer, of course, is that the choice depends on who's curious about what. Most wine consumers (and marketing Highlights • ew technologies and protocols are N rapidly expanding our ability to profile wine chemistry and microbiology. • owerful approaches to DNA sequencP ing reveal a complexity to the "microbial terroir" of wine fermentations. • ethods of chemical analysis make it M possible to predict sensory characteristics and determine the authenticity of wine label claims. departments) would prefer the traditional tasting note, which purports to offer some lip-smacking clues about how the wine would taste. But winemakers might get more mileage out of the DNA printout, which reveals exactly what kinds of critters were around during fermentation. Wouldn't that be worth knowing? High-tech profiling Several flavors of technically advanced wine profiling were on display in March at the annual Davis RAVE (Recent Advances in Viticulture and Enology). David Mills gave a fascinating pitch for the power of next-generation PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tools. Rather than using the technology to find out if a particular bit of DNA can be found within a sample— searching, let's say, for a specific spoilage organism—more comprehensive PCR methods spit out everything that's in the sample: the good and the bad, the usual suspects and the wholly unexpected. By focusing on a certain gene that is found in all bacteria but slightly variant in each species, the method amplifies sequences for all bacteria in the sample. Another gene holds the keys to all the fungi. And once the procedure has yielded, oh, 100,000 copies, they can all get matched against databases of genetic information and identified, detailing everything in the mix and the relative proportions of each. The software for interstate wine shipping compliance, with all its laws for sales tax rates in every county in the country, is certainly complex stuff, but this PCRmatching business is a digital doozy. Don't expect it to be offered via smart phone app any time soon. You know how good your Zinfandel is... Promote your wines to leading Zinfandel enthusiasts and extend your winery's relationship in the market. Join Us! We are champions of Zinfandel— America's Heritage Wine Become part of our proud legacy zinfandel.org • 530-274-4900 Zinfandel Advocates & Producers is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. ZAP is dedicated to advancing public knowledge of and appreciation for American Zinfandel and its unique place in our culture and history. Win es & Vi n es JU LY 20 13 71 4:44