Wednesday, September 16, 2009

By James Keller

Van Vuuren, like a third of the population, suffers from dreaded red wine headaches - a reaction, he explains, to chemicals produced in the fermentation process known as bioamines.

So with his colleagues at the university's wine research centre, van Vuuren developed a genetically modified yeast that can produce a bioamine-free - and headache-free - wine.

It's an example of the growing body of science into what is often seen as an ancient art, where images of dusty wooden barrels come to mind more readily than test tubes and lab coats.

But van Vuuren, whose research centre has just received $3.4 million in funding to continue work on the genetics of wine grapes and yeast, says good wine comes from good science.

"I think 90 per cent of winemaking is science-based, and 10 per cent constitutes an art," says van Vuuren.

"There's no art in growing grapes, and the fermentation, the yeast process is all scientific. It's actually when the wine is produced - the winemaker tastes these wines and gets an idea of how he wants to mix it - that, to me, is an art."

The latest money from Genome Canada and Genome B.C. will fund several studies at the wine research centre, established a decade ago as the province's wine industry began to see rapid growth, particularly in the Okanagan.

One project will look at ways to measure proteins while the grapes are still on the vines, allowing growers to better target management techniques such as fertilization. Another will explore how social, political and regulatory factors affect the wine industry.

Van Vuuren will be examining a group of 62 genes in wine yeast that are switched on during the fermentation process to determine what they do, and, eventually, whether they can be manipulated to improve the process.

It's the sort of research that might make some wine purists shudder, admits van Vuuren, but he says they'd be forgetting how central science has always been to the process.

"The first thing people usually ask me is, 'Who told you to do this?' and I say, 'Well, I get headaches from wines myself and I don't like that, and that's why I do that,'" he says.

"Obviously there are people that you cannot convince, and that's fine. It leads to interesting debate."

Tom DiBello, the winemaker at CedarCreek Estate Winery near Kelowna, B.C., says it's not a question of science versus art.

They're inseparable.

"I have a science degree, but I'm also very artistic," says DiBello.

"To me, the science is a better paint brush for the artist. The more you know, the more you understand about what's going on science-wise, the closer you can make things happen the way you want to."

However, the work at the University of British Columbia has also sparked the sort of controversy and debate that often follows attempts to tinker with the genes of what we eat - and it's something that DiBello is well aware of.

He's experimented with van Vuuren's genetically engineered yeast, which combines what is normally a two-step fermentation process into one.

But DiBello says CedarCreek hasn't used the yeast in any of its wines, because he's worried about potential backlash from customers who shun anything containing genetically modified ingredients. "It does exactly what it's supposed to do, and there's some advantages to having that go through (both fermentations) at the same time. But I'm afraid to put it in because of public perception."

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