Two forensic scientists at the University of Western Australia have found a way to prove the origin of wine chemically.
Alex Martin and John Watling used mass spectrometry to determine the chemical 'fingerprint' of 400 wines from around Australia.
The 'fingerprint' is made up of the concentration of over 60 trace elements. These depend mainly on the soil composition of the growing region and grape variety. It changes little during winemaking, transportation and storage.
Wines made from one grape variety in one region have similar chemical 'fingerprints', and are quite different to those of the same grape variety in other regions.
They are now building up a database of wines from around the world. Once completed it will be possible to identify the origin of an unknown wine sample by comparing its fingerprint to those in the database.
'We aim to reliably place a wine within 20km of its origin,' said Watling.
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So, I guess terroir really does exist, after all. Nice to finally put that one to rest!
Dave, Ireland
Might it finally be true that 'terroir' exists? One big question though: can these so-called 'trace elements' be tasted in wine and recognized by the palate time and time again?
Isn't 'terroir' still quite a lot of marketing talk by (especially French) wine growers and wine writers, to mask the still by science undefined forces and powers that make the structure of a wine? Last year I helped a friend of mine to make his first wine from Zweigelt grapes in Belgium. The vines were only three years old. Since he is a beginning winemaker, he doesn't have the budget to buy a heating/cooling system for his cellar. So, the must fermented very slowly at a low temperature. My friend did a saignée of about 25% of the total juice, which is a lot. The malolactic fermentation went on very slowly and only in the spring following the harvest, although he had inoculated the wine with lactic bacteria immediately after the alcoholic fermentation and tried to heat up the place to 17°C. After the malo had finished in May, he did only one racking and the wine stayed for six months on its lees. The whole vinification process took place in a stainless steel tank. He had about 450 litres of red wine.
The wine is bottled since two months and when I tasted it two weeks ago, there was quite a lot of complexity, although it missed length because of the age of the vines. Next to the typical deep fruit aroma's of Zweigelt, there were leathery notes, cigar box and something like a smoky earthiness, which a lot of wine writers would describe as 'terroir'. Sorry, but the vineyard used to be a maize field until three years ago and according to the opinion of most of these wine writers the vines are still too young to give 'terroir' to the wine. Couldn't this nice first wine just be the result of an elaborated vinification technique, maybe by coincidence? Isn't technique (maceration, fermentation etc.) responsible for most of the aroma's we get in a wine, as some scientists are investigating? Or did my friend hit the right spot? It would make my day to know it.
Filip Verheyden
The method isn't new. Well known Italian researcher/enologist/consultant Donato Lanati from Piedmont has used it for a while.
Eleonora, Italy
Yes, our winemaker and consultant Donato Lanati has been researching on this subject for long and is able to trace the wine origin within a restrict area of a few Km. A fantastic way to detect fake appellations and crus!
Roberto Bava, Bava Winery, Piemonte, Italy
Fraudsters beware--at least until some fraudmeister figures out how to forge the profile.
Lewis C Taishoff
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