Synthetic wine made without grapes claims to mimic fine vintages

“We can turn water into wine in 15 minutes.” So claims the Ava Winery, a San Francisco start-up that is making synthetic wine without grapes – simply by combining flavour compounds and ethanol. Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee came up with the idea while visiting a winery in California’s Napa Valley in 2015. There, they were shown the bottle of an iconic wine, Chateau Montelena, which is famous for being the first Californian chardonnay to beat French contenders at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976.